Until January 6, 2019, the House of the Tre Oci in Venice will host the photographs of the French artist Willy Ronis, in the most complete retrospective ever held in Italy, curated by Matthieu Rivallin, co-produced by the Jeu de Paume of Paris and the Médiathèque de l'architecture et du patrimoine, Ministry of culture – France, with the participation of the Venice Foundation, organized by Civita Three Venices.
The exhibition presents 120 vintage images, including a dozen unpublished dedicated to Venice, able to trace the entire career of one of the greatest interpreters of twentieth-century photography and protagonist of the French humanist current, together with masters of the caliber of Brassaï, Gilles Caron , Henri Cartier-Bresson, Raymond Depardon, Robert Doisneau, Izis, André Kertész, Jacques-Henri Lartigue and Marc Riboud.
While not a movement codified by a programmatic manifesto, the humanist one demonstrated its interest in the human condition and the simplest and most humble everyday life, to discover in it a universal existential meaning. Through his images, Ronis develops a sort of micro-stories built starting from the characters and situations drawn from the street and from everyday life, which lead him to become enraptured in front of reality and to observe the fraternity of peoples.
If it is true that his photographs correspond to an optimistic view of the human condition, Ronis does not hide its social injustice and is interested in the poorest classes. His sensitivity towards the daily struggles for survival in a precarious professional, family and social context reveals that his political convictions, as a communist militant, led him to an active commitment, through the production and circulation of images of the condition and workers' struggles.
Although most of his most reproduced images were taken in France, since his youth Ronis has not stopped traveling and photographing other places. Her style remains intimately linked to her experience and her way of understanding photography. In fact, he did not hesitate to recall his life and his political and ideological context. His shots and his texts tell of an artist eager above all to explore the world, spying on it in secret, patiently waiting for it to reveal its mysteries to him. In his eyes it is more important to receive images than to go looking for them, to absorb the outside world rather than grasp it and, from here, build his story.
