Walter Guadagnini, Director of CAMERA - Italian Center for Photography, has chosen to launch the 2018 exhibition season an exhibition that is both very Turinese and equally international, dedicated to Carlo Mollino. “The magical eye of Carlo Mollino. Photographs 1934-1973”, curated by Francesco Zanot, will be at CAMERA (Turin), from 18 January to 13 May 2018.
This initiative follows the exhibition “Carlo Mollino. Traveling”, held at CAMERA in the spring of 2016, testifying to the strengthening of the collaboration between the Politecnico and CAMERA, also thanks to a collaboration agreement signed in April of this year.
"I am delighted that the exhibition is the result of a fruitful collaboration with the Turin Polytechnic – declares Emanuele Chieli, President of CAMERA – demonstrating CAMERA's increasingly strong ability to dialogue with local institutions and to draw from this dialogue projects that combine scientific rigor and reasons of interest and curiosity for the general public. The relationship with the city has always been at the center of CAMERA's attention, as has attention to the wider world of international culture. Carlo Mollino condenses both of these aspects in his extraordinary and polymorphous figure: Turinese by birth and always active in the Piedmontese capital, Mollino has become in recent decades a figure appreciated well beyond the city and national borders, an eccentric master of XNUMXth century culture".
Among the best known and most celebrated architects of the twentieth century, Carlo Mollino has always reserved a privileged role for photography, using it both as a means of expression and as a fundamental tool for documenting and archiving one's work and one's daily life. This exhibition, the largest and most complete ever held on the subject, investigates the relationship between Mollino and photography, highlighting its uniqueness and recurring characteristics, starting from the first architectural images taken in the XNUMXs up to Polaroid of the last years of his life. Following in the footsteps of his father Eugenio, an engineer and passionate photographer, Carlo Mollino approached this expressive language from his youth, developing not only a vast corpus of images halfway between the canon of tradition, of which he was profoundly aware, and the impetus of experimentation, but also a peculiar critical conscience that led him to publish in 1949 "The message from the darkroom", an innovative and fundamental volume for the diffusion of photographic culture in Italy and its acceptance among the major arts. This exhibition thus proposes to explore the extraordinary complexity and fruitfulness of Carlo Mollino's reflection on photography, definitively placing him in the history of this discipline through an itinerary that alternates great classics with completely new and never previously exhibited works.
Overcoming any classification between genres, incompatible with the multiple and multifaceted nature of Carlo Mollino himself, who simultaneously carries out very different projects and interests making them inevitably merge with each other, the exhibition is divided into four thematic sections, each entitled with a quote taken from the writings by the same author.
In the first section, "A thousand houses", the images relating to the theme of living are collected, which obviously characterizes a fundamental portion of Mollino's photographic work: in addition to the images of the buildings (Mollino is among the few architects who, after having created them, reinterpret with the photographs his own buildings), still-lifes of domestic objects appear here, portraits set in the famous interiors designed by himself, and a series of snapshots taken during his travels as visual annotations of more or less known architecture, from wooden houses and straw from the Romanian countryside at Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum in New York, from Dutch mills to Le Corbusier's Chandigarh.
The second section, “Fantasies of an impossible daily life”, is centered on the atmosphere and surrealist inspirations that pervade a part of Mollino's photographic production. It is the freest and most unpredictable chapter of the entire exhibition. It includes very different photographs, always aimed at questioning the reality represented: there are images of shop windows that recall those shot in Paris by Eugène Atget, Man Ray's favorite photographer, isolated objects in the frame and charged with a mysterious life, mirrors that hide and multiply everything, photographs of other photographs, photomontages of architectural projects created starting from small models, up to a selection of precious images taken from the publication
“Magic eye”, from 1945. “Mystique of acrobatics” is the title of the third section, entirely dedicated to another very special interest of Carlo Mollino, that for speed, movement and dynamics. Here are gathered photographs on the theme of flight, which Mollino practiced as an expert acrobatic pilot, of motor racing, with particular attention to the story of the Bisiluro, a car he designed (together with Mario Damonte and Enrico Nardi) and with which he had participated in the "24 hours of Le Mans” in 1955, and of skiing, with a selection of photographs of lines traced by skiers on the snow, sinuous like the design profiles of the genius from Turin.
The fourth section, "L'amante del duca", the largest in the exhibition with over 180 selected photographs, is finally dedicated to the theme of the body and pose. Here two fundamental subjects of Mollino's entire photographic corpus are compared: female portraits (in addition to the famous Polaroids, numerous original black and white and color prints are on display) and skiers. Both are the result of a meticulous staging operation by Mollino, who demonstrates a particular attention to the control of the pose, obsessively reproducing the same gestures. The skiers are caught in positions that identify the perfection of the technical gesture (director of the commission of ski schools and instructors, in 1951 Mollino publishes the manual "Introduction to descent"), while the women, reminiscent of ancient statuary, replicate without stopping similar attitudes, against the backdrop of the same scenarios and dressed in the same clothes.
Finally, the exhibition is completed with some documents, including letters, manuscripts, original typescripts (relating in particular to the subsequent drafts of "The message from the dark room"), and a series of postcards collected by Carlo Mollino in every corner of the world which highlight , in addition to an attitude of constant research and curiosity, the lively interest in photography in all its forms and expressions.
All the materials on display, save for a few duly indicated exceptions, come from the collections of the Turin Polytechnic, Gabetti Library Archives, Carlo Mollino Fund.
"With great pleasure, the Archives section of the 'Roberto Gabetti' Central Library of Architecture accepted CAMERA's proposal to dedicate a wide-ranging exhibition to the photographic production of Carlo Mollino - recalls Professor Sergio Pace of the Polytechnic of Turin - DAD (Department of Architecture and Design). – The great Turin architect, throughout his career, paid extraordinary attention to this activity, thus leaving ample testimony not only of his own design activity, but also and above all of the vast interests and even unusual passions that the 'have made a unique figure in the Italian cultural landscape. There are thousands of shots, made with different techniques and often retouched by hand on negatives and/or positives: from the negative on the plate to the one on film, from black and white to color, from photomontage, made together with the photographer friend Riccardo Moncalvo, up to to the use of Polaroids for more private shots, the Polytechnic archives preserve a precious fund for understanding not only an unmistakable master, but also an essential chapter in the history of photography in XNUMXth-century Italy. Also by virtue of the breadth of these horizons, it is important to underline that the exhibition also makes use of the first results of a project for the digitization of Carlo Mollino's negatives, co-financed by the Piedmont Region”.
The exhibition is accompanied by a publication published by Silvana Editoriale and containing all the reproductions of the works on display as well as essays by Francesco Zanot, curator of the exhibition, Enrica Bodrato, Fulvio Ferrari and Paul Kooiker.
The activity of CAMERA is realized thanks to Intesa Sanpaolo, Eni, Reda, Lavazza, in particular the exhibition and cultural programming is supported by the Compagnia di San Paolo.
Image: Carlo Mollino – Mimì Schiagno, 1952-1960 c. (Turin Polytechnic, Roberto Gabetti Library Archives section, Carlo Mollino Fund)
