Atlas

For White Garage Rossana Taormina has created a completely new project: great visual representations that reproduce and expand old photographs recovered in flea markets, obedient to the stereotype of the “souvenir photo”. They are images that present technical errors or that bear tears due to the years: they have therefore suffered a “distortion” with respect to the “reality” they claim to represent. The images are shown on large panels in “flag” fabric, where the artist intervenes through stitching and darning, exalting or concealing, thus retracing the same operation that memory performs through memories.

What survives, in the image as in the memory, is the aura of a lived time and it is iridescent and elusive in its being continuously recontextualized or evoked. The Atlas welcomes in its metaphor places that are placed in a personal geography, but that are likely to be followed by those who share the path, threads that evoke places and routes, errors and rethinks, subtle units of textures in continuous evolution.

“Atlas” offers a reflection on the image and memory that draws on the artist’s extensive photographic archive, an indispensable tool in his research: a reflection that questions the role of contemporary images.

Traditional images, with their primordial expressive vitality, were for Aby Warburg the place where the social and cultural identity of the civilization that had produced them was deposited. However, the unity of the traditional world has gradually dissolved, until it has completely broken, a break perceived primarily by artists such as Christian Boltanski and even more so Gerhard Richter, who have been able to express the vertigo of permanence and at the same time the oblivion of the image.

Artists like them have shown how the contemporary imaginary is continuously crossed by uneven perspectives, by stratifications of meanings, each of which can lead in different directions. Rossana Taormina intends to show how the uncontrolled proliferating of images and the ease with which they can be shared seem to be instruments capable of removing us from oblivion, but could more likely, instead, bring about a significant change in the way we access memories, promoting the progressive immateriality of photographic collections.