| Massimo Vitali Massimo Vitali, a native of Como but Tuscan by choice, was born in 1944 and studied photography at the London College of Printing. A meeting with Simon Guttmann, the founder of the Report agency, prompted Vitali to begin a career in the 1960s in photo journalism for Italian and European magazines. In the 1980s he worked as a filmmaker for television and cinema and from the mid 1990s onwards he turned his attention to photography as a means for artistic research, shaping it into an original tool for portraying the world. His works are on show in museums and galleries throughout Europe and the USA. The Luigi Pecci Centre for Contemporary Art in Prato is the first Italian museum to present a retrospective exhibition on the work of Massimo Vitali, organized by Stefano Pezzato and Daniel Soutif, it looks back over the whole of Vitali’s production since 1995 to the present day, and comprises large-scale works divided by subject matter and chromatic dominant: the red of the crowded beach at Riccione, the blue of the Tyrrhenian coastline or the swimming pools of northern Europe, the green of the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris and the sand dunes of the Belgian coast, the white of the beach at Knokke and the snow at Les Menuires and the black of the night parties on the beach or in the discotheque. |
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| Vitali’s work is the product of a
complex process ranging from selecting locations where
people gather, to setting up on a raised viewpoint to
create a feeling of separation from the subjects being
portrayed, the long perspective which, however, can still
capture the smallest details and the repetition or
decomposition in series of the scenes, and then arranging
the pictures as a means for understanding the space they
are exhibited within. The wealth of actions that takes place on different planes of the same image without the artist having to intervene on the subject enables provides the work with many different possibilities for interpretation and enables us to discover reality in ways we had never experienced before. |
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Genova Pegli West, 2002 |
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"The images must have a magical dimension in which perhaps sociology intermingles with play, and which have a story to tell. In the final analysis, I am happy when the ways of interpreting my pictures are complex and sometimes contradictory. A beach, where there are people playing in the water, with a factory in the background can be seen as a criticism of leisure-based society just as it can be seen as showing up the destruction of nature - mindlessness in the face of environmental issues. At the same time, the same image shows a contrasting set of notions: pleasure, games, bodies, loving relationships and the sickly sweet colour of the water evoking the lost idea of beauty, or those ancient pictures in which bodies float like purgatory. I am so curious I let myself get pulled along to almost voyeurism. The way people behave fascinates me but I don’t try to understand what it’s all about. My part is neutral - all I do is take note of what comes to me. I am rigid because I take a stance and then I wait for things to come to pass in front of me. I am open because the image is defined by what happens. The experience of photography becomes an open practice for experiencing the world." (Massimo Vitali) The exhibition features about 50 photographs by Vitali from private collections and important European galleries, here together for the first time. They include many diptychs, triptychs and polyptychs, renowned series such as Rosignano (1995/98) and Riccione (1997), more recent works like Pic-nic (2000) and Kiss (2001), while others, like the large Knokke polyptych (2002) and a number of new works produced for this occasion have never been presented in Italy before. |
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Viareggio Air Show, 1995 |
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| postmedia.net | Massimo Vitali |
postmedia.net |
