Reframing

Reframing is a different way of looking at a situation, by changing its meaning, looking at it from a different perspective.
When the frame is shifted, the meaning changes.

An image inside another image

We have no longer direct access to things. In a world dominated by images, the reality is always mediated, filtered, pre-selected. In this series, I have faced a classical genre of the painting: the nude, reinterpreting it in a contemporary key, just by leveraging this aspect. In some canvases, a photo print is clearly represented (the painting becomes then a still life too), in others I have made the subject hold the frame, then we have an inner frame that maybe just limit the face (a portrait then?) and the natural frame of the picture.

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In some cases, I played with deformation and multiplication of the image, diving a photo in a glass for example… It’s a game of images inside other images; a contemporary view on the painting genres, it’s a reflection of how each frame is part of a larger frame, in turn, part of an even bigger one….

The same idea has been developed in different ways, in this that is a uniform plan.

Reframing the genres

There’s also e secondary issue that links all these paintings. I was interested to reframe the pictorial genres, the nude, the portrait, the still life, the landscape,…
I shifted my interest from the subject, a nude male, to the genre, the male nude, and worked on it.

Please look at Reframing 7,  there’s a photo over other photos, in this photo, Giorgio holds a frame that enframes his face. Still life becomes Male nude that becomes a Portrait. Every image, in its arbitrarity, is obviously just a part of the whole, but it’s also made of other inner images, with different statutory purposes.

This shift in the genres is obviously just a pretext. Nobody cares about painting genres anymore, maybe nobody cares about the art of painting itself. Then? The genres in the art were categories, even better categories fallen into disuse. In the past, they were such important, their boundaries so clearly made. And now they have lost all their importance, we can shift from one into another and nobody notices it. Does it suggest you anything about the genders too?

Other works

Framing, enframing and reframing are issues that characterize all my work.
In the Travel Journal page, you’ll find two paintings that could have been included in this page. They are Gondoliers 1 and 2. Venice has almost lost its alive city status to become an open-air museum. Our imaginary about it is so conditioned that we see the city as a postcard. Then depicting the most picturesque subject, the gondoliers, I’ve decided to embed a frame inside the painting, that grants or not with the external frame.
Another example, all my photos developed the idea that every image is a second-hand handle on the World, and that a direct window on it is impossible to achieve. Please check the Photos page for more.

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Framing, enframing and reframing is a chapter in the book “Event” by the Slovanian philosopher Slavoj Zizek.

Here an interview wih Slavoj Zizek, he talks about what is an Event, which is something that changes retroactively the perception on something.  Reframing a situation is not the same thing?