Matteo Pizzolante

Transfiguring an image taken from the news, Al bosco di tutti, the work created for the Cairo Prize by Matteo Pizzolante, performs an act of witnessing. The landscape that is the work's protagonist, only at first glance placid and bucolic, is actually the place where an industrial accident occurred: on April 8, 2008, in Stresa, Italy, young Filippo Turati lost his life working for a farm. The photograph circulated at the time by the online press to illustrate the news is taken and edited using 3D modeling software, and then printed on plasterboard using the cyanotype technique. The construction supporting the image, supported by wooden pillars, is a kind of “abstract architecture,” as Pizzolante calls it, that engages the viewer by sending him or her back to the environment where the accident occurred. Coincidences also become part of the work: the young worker's homonymy with the founder of the Italian Workers' Party (later the Socialist Party) amplifies the meaning of the operation, even more so considering that the Palazzo della Permanente, home of the Cairo Prize, is located right on Via Turati. “In line with my usual research,” the artist comments, ”the work considers real people and places capable of expressing fatal connections and coincidences, capable of provoking questions and doubts in the viewer.” The starkest reality is thus transfigured without falling into aestheticization, but amplifying the sense of denunciation.

Stefano Castelli