In Viaggio (On Trip
)

29 ARTS IN PROGRESS

On the occasion of the first edition of Milan Photo Week 2017, the 29 Arts in Progress Gallery of Milan, pays homage to one of the greatest Masters of contemporary photography, Gian Paolo Barbieri and, particularly, to the cycle “Tropical” and his long photographic itinerary: which sees him starting from the eighties, in exotic and distant places, collecting unpublished portraits of a humanity and of an intact nature, fragments of memory destined to be lost forever instants subtracted to a process of metamorphosis and unstoppable devastation.

Barbieri therefore, perhaps for the first time, finds himself completely alone behind the camera and in front of a subject that has a need; rather it doesn’t conceive any possibility of alteration or setting.

The result is the quality of the attention and the intelligent honesty of eyes able to authentically access the interiority of the subject.

Nonetheless the photographer doesn’t romantically believe that an uncontaminated nature populated by savages could exist without culture: the time is implacably gone by and the flow of things continually drags forms and languages with itself toward nothingness. Therefore he fills the void left by the irrecoverable with aesthetical sense, with taste and with allusions to the history of the art.