Giancarlo Lamonaca

What type of printing do you prefer?

It depends on the work. Since they are generally large-format photographic installations, the context and the type of installation are crucial. The materials vary based on the specific needs of each work. It’s a constant challenge between the possible and the laws of physics.

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 particular techniques or processes that strike you?

The truth, as often happens, lies somewhere in the middle. New printing and processing technologies impact the possibilities of every project. It’s also true, however, that the project itself requires research into new and original techniques and materials, as well as implementation options based on different needs. Digital technology has given me a huge boost and opened up new avenues that until a few years ago only existed in my dreams. Today I’m fortunate enough to daydream and realize projects that are close to the impossible.

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

I think of Gordon Matta Clark when he pierces, cuts, or modifies a building and “creates” new approaches and perspectives. His actions, addressing the inevitable temporality of architecture and the subversion of its basic principles, precisely mirror what I attempt to achieve in my photographic research. 

I’m thinking of the German school of Düsseldorf, which produced photographers like Andreas Gursky, Thomas Ruff, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth—all, I believe, students of the legendary couple Bernd and Hilla Becher. It was they who “opened” photography to new processing technologies and popularized the idea of ​​the inscrutability of reality.

I also studied painting and I just can’t get over my fascination with the great masters of history, which, however, somewhat muzzle (perhaps a good thing) my freedom of expression. And I’ll stop there, because the list is long…

I really appreciate his work, I appreciate its coherence and stylistic elegance, a very rare combination in today’s artistic panorama.

What struck me most was the obsessive and constant presence of Space as the absolute protagonist of his poetics.

A Space that has engulfed the concept of Time, making it its own, chewing it and digesting it like Goya’s Saturn (who devours his children).

He has been called “a painter who uses a camera” and I agree; there is a lot of Art History in his works, I can even glimpse references to Giotto’s medieval frescoes in Assisi and Padua and to those by Masaccio and Masolino in the Brancacci Chapel (Florence), just to name a few.

According to the custom of the time, the frescoes condensed Space and Time in the same image, sacrificing the concept of perspective realism in favor of the narration of events.

I see in his personal research the narration of places and, having voluntarily eliminated the human presence from them, of their silences.

Could you tell me, if it consciously exists, the origin of this “making Art” and which in your opinion is the work that best represents it?

Time (which engulfs space) is king, it has always fascinated me and accompanies my research. When I get lost, it is he who brings me back on the path, he is the one from whom I draw inspiration and motivation. Its continuous presence, in my opinion non-linear, indelible, unifies everything under its revealing and destructive wing. This is its motion, like the goddess Kali of Hinduism, who is intrinsically progenitor and destroyer, and it could not be otherwise. What is created is also transformed. Inseparable from time, space is a consequence of it.

Therefore the use of photography is the ideal tool to uncover the nuances, implications, consequences but also premises. I am not talking about before and after, but rather about how and why in a utopian eternal contemporaneity of events, virtually condensed in an absurd and improbable attempt to fix a present. My interventions constitute first of all a challenge to the idea of ​​space, time, reality inherent to the concept of photography, opening new fronts of dialogue with the existing. They are physical and symbolic actions that reflect the fascination of legitimately ambiguous things.

The objective is to understand that every realistic element hides or implies something ambiguous, evasive, enigmatic. We are called to search for what does not exist, the possible alternative, the other side of the world. There is also the need to address, through a conceptual matrix, a dilation and expansion of the real world, as we know it, towards another dimension and to show how every form of knowledge or experience holds within itself a sort of potential and hypothetical imaginary repertoire.

It’s as if nothing can ever be pinned down and never truly  “seen.”

It is in this impossible limitation of the world”, wrote Ghirri, that photography finds meaning”. Here, photography is the quintessence of noisy silence, what the Zen master defines as the sound of silence. 

More than the human being, I am interested in his potential, the traces he produces and which are inevitably destined to disappear. I think of the human being as a transitory phenomenon of this planet.

As for which work best represents me, I think that only the whole can decode a complexity that I myself struggle to fully decipher and which is constantly evolving.

Future projects?

Projects with the public and private sectors continue. A solo exhibition is planned for 2022, along with other exhibitions, school education projects, and museum projects. Behind the scenes, a pleasant buzz continues. 

Each interval is a moment of reflection, contemplation, and exploration, with an eye toward the progression and refinement of the ever-evolving poetics.