Insight - Photographs and Video by Silvio Wolf February 12, 2009

INSIGHT

Photography and Video by Silvio Wolf

The Gallery of the Italian Cultural Institute is pleased to present Insight, the first solo-show of Italian artist Silvio Wolf in San Francisco.

Following Wolf’s successful exhibition Voyager at New York’s Robert Mann Gallery, Insight represents the artist’s further investigation of the theme of Real and Illusionary in photography. An internationally acclaimed artist, Silvio Wolf leads gallery visitors on a metaphorical journey, weaving in and out of representation and abstraction, through successive stages of appearance and disappearance of the subject.

The opening picture in the exhibition, Lightscape, is a metaphorical tribute to San Francisco’s architecture: the sharp façade of a downtown skyscraper, blurred by the reflection of light on its monumental surface, becomes a disquieting monolith.

From here, the voyage through the gallery space unwinds in a succession of triptychs, diptychs and individual large scale pictures that challenge the technical ability of photography to depict reality, generating manifold interpretations of the subject.

The Chance series explores translucent surfaces, curtains filtering light, often through narrow openings. These images convey the idea of appearance, as visible subjects vanish to be replaced by creations of the mind’s eye.

The Horizons series, perhaps the most abstract and best known work by the artist, explores the nature of photography through imagery created by film leaders exposed to light during the process of loading the camera. These Horizons represent a symbolic farewell to analogue photography even as they allude to the possibility of a rebirth of photographic imaging, through the energy of light and time freed from the arbitrariness of the photographer’s decisions. The immediacy of the photographic image at its birth creates a dramatic space of engagement and interpretation.

Three other large-scale photographs, Canvas and Large Myhrab, depict different architectural subjects; metaphors of places puzzling the visitor’s eye with the ambiguity of their still, timeless subjects. Although we see these pictures sharply, we cannot identify them clearly; the pictures act as perceptual thresholds, provoking meditations on absence and presence, inside and outside, here and there.

Finally, the video Il Tesoro (The Treasure) takes viewers on a magically subjective voyage through the vault of a Swiss bank. The camera’s floating eye descends and enters a mysterious space, entirely clad in reflecting and opaque metal surfaces, a space created to give invisible form to the abstract financial treasures it contains. The camera’s wandering gaze penetrates the place, and as the cold surfaces slowly dissolve they reveal their immaterial secret. The evident and the hidden both appear, the near and the infinitely far: echoes of light, stellar spaces seen as if from a spaceship. The fluid sequence finally leads back to its beginning, through an ascent that suggests this journey of perception will begin again.

In Silvio Wolf’s theatre of light, visitors are not simply viewers but voyagers on a journey, engaged in defining what they see and discovering what they can know. Wolf’s photographs offer a deep insight into the subtle, emotional and meditative reality of seeing. They suggest a vision that transcends the physicality of the objects depicted. In them, the visible is just a starting point, an opportunity for poetic understanding.

On view: Monday - Friday; 9 am - 5 pm

Official Website: http://www.iicsanfrancisco.esteri.it/IIC_Sanfrancisco