At CIAC in Foligno, George Tatge's metaphysical Italy. Unpublished exhibits dedicated to the city

From July 28 to Oct. 8, 2023, CIAC - Centro Italiano Arte Contemporanea in Foligno will showcase the black-and-white images of photographer George Tatge. Curated by Italo Tomassoni, organized by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Foligno, and produced by Maggioli Cultura, GEORGE TATGE. Metaphysical Italy, this is the title of the exhibition, aims to be an exhibition of signs, symbols and sacred geometries, inspired by Italy “built,” marked and modified byhuman intervention. Through sixty-six black and white images: not only architecture, but also minor buildings and artifacts of all kinds that man leaves behind. Metaphors and mysteries of temporary dwelling in places and the inevitable passage beyond. One section is dedicated to Foligno, with original photographic shots taken by Tatge for the occasion, telling of the mystery, the enigma of our living and the coexistence of the past with the present.

George Tatge offers a new series of photographs taken around Italy. The relationship between nature and man gives way to a single protagonist, man, and his interventions in the territory, with all the social, industrial and religious meanings they entail. Whether rigorous Roman-era buildings or anonymous apartment buildings in urban suburbs, imposing Renaissance churches or desolate disused factories, Tatge basically sees a trace, a deep, sometimes hidden imprint. Fragments of reality, bizarre and surreal juxtapositions, open, thanks to the ambiguity of the content, to the viewer’s interpretation. Some of the spaces portrayed may recall the visions of painters who worked in the early twentieth century, but in this work the term Metaphysical emphasizes the use of a physical place to express an abstract concept or a particular mood. The Surrealists’ focus on symbols, the unconscious and the complexity of the psyche is also encountered in other images by Tatge. His poetics of the gaze places poetry and photography on the same plane, as both are arts of the fragment.

“What struck me is how much the city has been renewed in the last forty years. But you will not find images here that portray these improvements,” Tatge explained about the section devoted to the city of Foligno. “I preferred to focus on the corners of the city that express something else. As in the case of the CIAC itself, which happily flanks buildings from centuries past. So statues, niches (perhaps fountains?), former cinemas, disused factories, places that still speak to us in their silence. The long branches of an ivy that over the decades slowly took possession of a metal fence, still embracing it despite the fact that it is now dead. Or the interior of a plane tree found in Canapé Park, a dark world formed who knows over the course of how many seasons, inhabited by who knows how many creatures? What faces appear to us from the walls, what shapes lurk beneath the liquid ooze? A universe hidden in the middle of a city park, inviting us to lose ourselves in its interior. Photography as metaphor. This is my passion.”

“George Tatge places himself in a poetic area that, even if it is not and does not want to be that of creative photography, perpetuates an idea of photography that is the bearer of an autonomous and self-sufficient language in which the contribution of interpretation of the real, conjoined with the action of the imaginary, reconciles, in the body of the work, the duality between ephemeral and eternal,” said the curator. “More precisely, the ephemerality of photographic time is such that it reproduces and fixes a temporal suspension that inevitably intertwines each time with the eternity of art time. It is on this suspension that the corpus of shots to which Tatge has attributed the title ”Italia Metafisica“ is inscribed as a weld and which, together with a penetrating homage to the city of Foligno, interpreted with enchanted accents of pure and surprising poetry, constitutes the monographic theme on which the plot of this exhibition is tacked. Clearly intelligible, documentary, ordered figures, linked to the time of the shot but also to the time of history, memory and imagination, and which, above all, hint at a mystery that is the mystery that lurks behind or beneath the visible and that is the secret that always lives within the work of art. A final note. The idea of a metaphysical reading of reality could only have been suggested to Tatge’s imagination by Italian places. Not only because it was here, in 1913, that metaphysical painting was born (from which, moreover, Tatge linguistically is not inspired) but because only Italy can still provide, despite everything, and in both places and non-places, fascinating cues for an ”elsewhere“ capable of removing the anorexia of that fatal indifference that modernity is increasing every day.”

For info: www.ciacfoligno.it

Image: George Tatge, Palaces and Chairs (2023; silver salt print from negative, 13 x 18 cm; Foligno)

At CIAC in Foligno, George Tatge's metaphysical Italy. Unpublished exhibits dedicated to the city

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