On Saturday 11 December at 6:30pm the Vistamare gallery inaugurates a solo exhibition dedicated to Mimmo Jodice, the famed Italian photographer born in Naples seventy-five years ago.
More than 30 photographs will be on show, all in black and white and for the most part prints made by the artist himself. The exhibition centres on two themes that have been of fundamental importance in his artistic career: Mediterranean and Sea.
Mediterranean brings together a series of photographs taken from the mid Eighties onwards, a voyage into the ancient culture of Greece, its flourishings and cross-pollinations, a journey through diverse times and places. Like all of Jodice’s photographs these are images born over the course of a pilgrimage, never neurotic, but if anything constellated with happy digressions, and as is his wont, much of the work takes place in the darkroom where the artist switches on his lights, creates the right degree of contrast, chisels a relief or flattens out a surface. We do not see ruins but what remains of the ancient culture in the thinking, the methods and the visual memory of the artist. If we consider that many of these images are photographs taken in museums, we see the tenacious persistence of the past in modern times.
The idea of a circular time, of nature’s cyclical progression, also lies behind the series of photographs dedicated to the Sea, which for over ten years now he has continued to enrich with new images. The sea in Jodice’s photographs is normally observed from land, and from this position we see it draw back and flow in again. Stock still in front of the sea, the artist waits for a wave capable of designing a beautiful image, leaning out to recoup a dilated, slowed, reflective rhythm which lends vitality to that of the action.
Everything we encounter is an interior landscape, a metaphor to describe the artist’s relationship with photography and with the world: “What happens to me is that the camera’s lens, which should look outwards and observe the real world, instead ends up looking inwards, projecting a timeless dimension out into the world. And yet places do not betray us: they conserve their objectivity – the island is always an island – we recognize their geography and history, their materials and their humour”. (Mimmo Jodice, Isolario Mediterraneo).