Il Mezzogiorno – il mio amore sporco

Il Mezzogiorno – il mio amore sporco

There is some disturbing ambiguity in the fascination with which we are drawn to images depicting decay, ruin, and destruction. All the more so when they concern human life, set in and marked by such scenery. A similar consternation is caused by the fact that one of the constantly recurring themes of photography or painting is humanity crippled by the destructive passage of time, affected by some shameful frailty or repulsive ugliness. The photographer’s lens seeks their opposite pole as much as beauty and beauty.

I found this kind of photographic beauty in southern Italy.

For northern Italians, three-million-year-old Naples is the epitome of provincialism and disdainful exoticism. The plebeian temperament of the Neapolitans, their irritating dialect, poorly understood by Italians themselves, the pervasive chaos and disorder that are an integral part of life here, the incurable poverty and crime, are something completely foreign to residents of even the perfectly Europeanized Milan.

In yet another way, the quintessential periphery is Palermo, from which it is closer in a straight line to Tunis than to Rome. It is here, almost in the very center, that you will find La Kalsa – a slum neighborhood bombed during World War II and still not rebuilt, devoid of sanitation, which was marked on city plans as a white spot without streets or buildings.  

My photographs depict the people living there in their typical situations, in which both the dreariness and melancholy of their existence and its almost epic colorfulness are revealed.

Piotr Millati 1967
He lives in Sopot. By profession a literary historian working at the University of Gdansk. A photographer-traveler by avocation.
Favorite subject of photos – street scenes and landscapes.

DANCING WOMAN

Dancing Woman

by Thorsten Raab

A digital exhibition presented by

Zenvampires

Some entities can, when we look at them, communicate with us. They tell us more than we see with eyes. Like the surface or color. They communicate with us. They can let us feel a rhythm. And the rhythm comes before the music. Creating music today, we mostly create a good rhythm before we create music. Some anthropologists say (I’m not sure if Levy – Strauss said it), that ancient cultures, mostly shaman cultures, used all the same rhythm. Rhythm can let us dance and the dance can let us forget. But rhythm is not only important for music. It’s also important for writing. Homer used it as well as Shakespeare. And even if a writer doesn´t use it (like Bursa in his poems), he worked with it. Because when we break the rhythm, the audience can feel it. The entity then has nothing to say. Or it says that it´s broken. Husserl spent hours to find out, what an entity can tell us.

When we use rhythm in paintings, it may be possible to dance. In the rhythm. Thorsten’s paintings have that rhythm. When we look at them, we can feel it. As I said describing his previous exhibition (here), we can feel the music in his pictures. And then maybe we can dance to the music. Try it. Just look and dance.

Thorsten is a painter and DJ from Hamburg, Germany. He is inspired by funk, dub, Hip-Hop, and what we know as Black Music. But also by writers like Paul Auster and Toni Morrison. And also by street art, by Outsider art (in Germany known as Art Brut), and also by the Cobra Group.

We are proud to present a second exhibition by Thorsten Raab. 

All pieces ©by Thorsten Raab. Photo edition by Zenvampires.

We don´t sell Thorstens paintings. We only show them.

 

Click on the picture for a better resolution.

FOXY | Acryl auf Leinwand, 100cm x 100cm
PEACE | mixed media ( Tinte, Acryl ) auf Packpapier, ca.100cm x 70cm
ROBOTNIK | Acryl Farbstifte & Edding auf grundiertes Packpapier, 100cm x 70cm
DIA DE LOS MUERTES | Acryl Farbstifte & Buntstifte auf grundiertes Packpapier
YELLOWISH GREEN (AMSTERDAM) | Acrylfarbe auf grundiertes Packpapier, ca. 100cm x 70cm
BOOST | Acryl Farbstifte & Edding, Hairspray auf grundiertes Packpapier, ca. 110cm x 80cm
DANCING WOMAN | Übermalung mit Acryl Farbstiften und Acryl auf Linoleumdruckpapier
MIXED FIGURES | Jaxonkreide & Edding auf Packpapier
MAZED | Acryl & Acryl Farbstifte auf grundiertes Packpapier, ca. 60cm x 70cm
QUEEN & PRINCE | Acryl auf grundiertem Packpapier, ca. 60cm x 70cm
SPRING AGAIN (R.I.P BIZ MARKIE) | Acryl & Acryl Farbstifte auf Packpapier, 100cm x 180cm
Don T Loose Ya Mind ( FROM TUTU ALBUM ) | Edding auf Weisspapier
LOST | Acryl Farbstifte & Edding auf grundiertes Packpapier, ca. 70cm x 64cm
N.Y.C / 2001 | Acryl Farbstifte auf Papier ( Übermalung )
OOOH JESUS | Acryl und Industrie Painter auf Malpappe , 80cm x 60cm
ABORIGINES | Acryl auf Leinwand, 70cm x 50cm
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