The project is part of the programming of the Offside contemporary art review, conceived by Maria Luisa Pacelli, comparing the work of contemporary artists with the work of masters of the past.
Henri Foucault reflects on light and on the relationship between surface and matter and questions sculpture starting from the medium that appears to be farthest from it: photography. The photographic image is born when light hits a surface and, unlike the plastic arts, the support on which it is fixed is almost irrelevant. And it is precisely from the luminous trace that Foucault creates the volume.
The female body is the artist's favorite subject, favorite subject, pure form and only later Foucault intervenes on the frame and decorates the images with materials taken from couture, such as Swarovski crystals or pinheads.
In contrast to the sculptural act par excellence – subtraction – Foucault gives shape to the photographic act thanks to the elements added to the film: what shines and glitters creates changing volumes, crystalline variations, palpitations of the flesh revealed thanks to the light.
His creative process has an ideal tangency with the painting of Boldini, who is also committed to shaping the poses of his "divines" and to creating a dynamic relationship with space and the viewer, through the depiction of sparkling silks, swirls of color , of vibrant brushstrokes in which the bodies seem to disappear.
Among the works on display in Ferrara, there is also an original production inspired by a painting by Boldini exhibited at Palazzo dei Diamanti, the Amazon (c. 1879-80, Milan, Galleria d'Arte Moderna), a painting whose composition has an almost photographic value, "frozen" compared to other works by the Ferrarese in which the movement seems to be unstoppable. And it is precisely this fixity that brings Foucault's painstaking work closer to Boldini's turbulent brush: for both, in the final analysis, the body no longer has boundaries, freed in one case by light, in the other by movement.
Henri Foucault | Shiny bodies
Diamond Palace
Until June 2 2019
