Luigi Cazzaniga

What type of printing do you prefer?

Years ago, I hand-printed color blowups in complete darkness in the darkroom of Renato Gozzano, a Milanese still life photographer. I built tanks with plastic sheeting, Styrofoam, and cardboard tubes, and used them as backdrops. We rolled the prints overnight for hours, developing, bleaching, fixing, washing… it was a killer experience. For the Soncino Biennial and for The Hole gallery in Manhattan with NEWLAB, I tried lightweight materials like Flag for transparencies, Pearl, or Lightex, which is truly amazing when lit from behind. 

What comes first, the idea or the fascination with the material? In other words, does the artistic/photographic project come first, or is it inspired by the techniques and particular processes that strike you?

Which came first, man or woman, not to mention chicken and eggs?

It depends on which chicken.

I mean, just kidding, I usually print on matte canvas. I print a lot at home in New York, and large canvas prints roll up and take up little space. They’re not delicate, and if you want, you can mount them like a painter’s canvas on a wooden frame. But sometimes certain images require a different type of material. We printed some images on plexiglass because the image required it, and then   the plexiglass gave us the idea of ​​hanging them among the plants as garden images.

Do you have any Masters you look up to and feel close to?

At the beginning I always liked Avedon, but my teacher was Pino Abbrescia, a photographer who took portraits of actors in Rome, natural photos taken outdoors on the Lungotevere with Nikons, in sunny areas full of white, all photographs taken quickly to capture the moment and the expression.

Then, of course, reporters Capra and his friends, Bailey, and Penn. These days, Rita Barros, a Portuguese photographer who teaches at NYU, Francesco Nazardo, who has his own unique style, and, of course, Attilio Solzi, from Soresina, I think, who works in a hospital but makes art books for a French publisher.

Observing his visual art works, one finds oneself faced with abstract kaleidoscopic forms, floral masses, gardens, portraits, and street photography shots reworked with an almost Fauvist taste for color and at the same time imbued with that Japanese preciousness taken from the early Viennese Secessionism. 

In his works there is the world, seen and reinterpreted through a spectroscope.

Spectroscopy, in fact, deals with the examination and interpretation of the spectra of light emitted when matter is appropriately excited.

It is an excitement for life that the chromatic range of his works conveys, a frenzy that is acid and direct, baroque and hedonistic, but which gives in to no idealization.

These works are rooted in reality and in people, who are perceived as the focus of his artistic research.

“Words appear in the streets to answer your thoughts” is the phrase that accompanies a post on his personal Instagram profile and is a hymn to serendipity, to the wonder of the encounter between strangers and between distracted eyes and a work of art, which appears, unexpectedly, on our path.

Would you like to tell us who and what has the ability to amaze Luigi Cazzaniga, what characteristics spark his curiosity as an artist, as a videomaker? 

Speaking of serendipity, but at this point also of synchronicity, you must watch my film “Blu o The Amici di Camicia (shirt buddies)” currently in four episodes on Exquisite Pandemic, a cultural web magazine from New York City, but also on Vimeo (https://vimeo.com/434157742) .

That is, I construct images with colors, I manipulate and manipulate because it is stronger than me, until something beautiful or different comes out, but I remain a photographer and Blu is a very real photographic story without stylistic alterations, a reportage of synchronisms and various things that as a photographer I have seen and see happen.

A strange video diary, at times unbelievable. It was like discovering something real you’d never realized. 

Future projects?

NFTs?

I’ve done digital things and I realized that they have a lot to do with NFTs.

So, the other day, after trying to figure out what to do with the accounts you need to open, the wallets you need to connect, the ether you need to buy, etc., etc., I managed to put one on a blockchain, but I was so stressed out that I don’t remember which site it ended up on. Maybe Lazy.com?