Luca Lupi's Exhibitions made of light on paper are on display in Sarzana

The museums are still closed, but the galleries are open: thus, from April 10 to May 15, 2021, the Cardelli & Fontana gallery in Sarzana opens the exhibition Esposizione di Luca Lupi (Pontedera, 1970), which thus returns for the third time to the premises of the Ligurian gallery, this time, however, with a very special project, because it is about new photographic works executed by the artist during the lockdown in April 2020. They are images that are part of the typical research of the Tuscan artist on the infinite (such as the photographs dedicated to the sea) or on the finite embraced by the gaze (for example, the land seen from the sea), on the indistinct, on time, on duration. The Exposures are images of circles, rectangles, surfaces and simple shapes produced by light eroding the pigments of colored papers in the time of exposure. Lupi felt the need to devote himself to this new series at a time when it was not possible to go out, and the photographer therefore could not go to the seas and coasts that are the most typical objects of his research.

“Luca Lupi,” writes critic Ilaria Mariotti in the exhibition’s introductory text, “seems here to experience all the work with light but shifting the plane of research to a sphere that I would define as parallel. In photography, the image is formed by light captured by more or less sophisticated devices. The Exposures, this is the title for all the works in the new series, are simple images (circles, rectangles that sometimes suddenly expand), or definable as surfaces that camp on the plane. [...] [Luca Lupi] began exposing the colored sheets to sunlight experimenting with tightness and effects, multiplying variables, testing duration and results. A process of experimentation that starts from simple, domestic, nearby things. Windows, for example. He began constructing increasingly elaborate masks, with their edges beveled or straight, vertical to the surface: screens with which to hide portions of the paper alsole, studying the way light penetrates the cracks, diffracts in the gaps, erodes color unevenly. Test the effects of exposure duration. Very long at first, twenty days, a month and even two sometimes to get a significant result: and it’s not always the same for all colors because yellows, reds, purples, greens react differently.”

“The work evolves, the experimentation becomes more sophisticated,” Mariotti continues: "lamps used in art diagnostics (which have the same frequency as sunlight) then even more powerful ones shorten exposure times; the workbench can be moved to the studio, allows to operate flat, then to test positions of the sheet exposed directly to the light source eliminating masking. On the back of each paper Lupi marks the exposure time: masking, tilting, color, timing produce unique pieces, declining, along with the progressive number, the serial title. Papers divided in half by flashes of light that last for months, days or hours, glare on the front that marks the area of the papers exposed to light from the area that remains protected; circles and rectangles that are the result of more geometric masking, increasingly calibrated exposures. But what is squared before our eyes is a rich imagery of acheropite variables (just as, for that matter, not from the human hand is photography born) where light, natural or artificial, directed, channeled, loosened, seems at once matter and apparition, phenomenon and object. Our imagination and sensibility do the rest: sea horizons invested by last gleams or dawn lights appear, symbolic windows that by the pastiness of the papers are embodied apparitions, we seem to catch a glimpse of a landscape there where the light has stained the paper consuming it ’by way of levare’. Figures and abstractions together call to us a vast and articulated, sometimes conflicting imaginary: from the suprematist monochromatic appearances of Ivan Vasil’evič Kljun to the liquid backgrounds of Mark Rothko by way of slabbering margins and a sense of indefiniteness that detaches the forms from the paper. Mobile and fixed at the same time."

The Cardelli & Fontana gallery is open within the limits set by the anti-Covid decrees with hours 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and 4:30-7:30 p.m., excluding Sundays and by appointment. For info you can visit Cardelli & Fontana’s website.

Image: Luca Lupi, Exhibition XXIII (May 6-May 26, 2020; light on paper, 20-day exhibition, 50 x 70 cm)

Luca Lupi's Exhibitions made of light on paper are on display in Sarzana

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