Naples, at PAN the still lifes of Jacquie Maria Wessels made in garages around the world

From Dec. 18, 2021 to Jan. 13, 2022, the PAN | Palazzo delle Arti in Naples will host the exhibition Garage stills by Jacquie Maria Wessels, curated by Marina Guida and promoted by the Culture Department of the City of Naples. Described as visionary and meticulous, the Dutch artist’s photographic series aims to document a reality that is slowly disappearing as, as written in the presentation text, “computerized technology in workplaces is taking over.”

To bring the project to life, Wessels went in search of garages around the world, where she became fascinated by the shapes, colors and objects that inhabit the garage universe. After an analysis of the environment, the artist creates still lif es directly on site using the available objects.

On display are about thirty works made with an analog camera. Her intervention is not limited to simple documentation; hers is a procedure through which the very technique of photography is cracked, because the Dutch photographer’s analogue is moved by the desire to exert a displacement that alters the gaze on things and objects. The latter are repositioned and returned to a still life dimension, typical ofFlemish and Dutch art. With a clear reference to the iconographic tradition of her country, Wessels’ photos tell how computerized technology can become a vehicle of loss and loss of memory and, which, with their reiteration in medium format, force the gaze onto another dimension that is a trace instead of the passage of the working man.

The garages become"non-places" in which the disorder andassemblage of objects and tools leave room for the imagination; through his lens he wants to make the last traces of a fading reality heard, the traces of the men who work or worked here.In Naples, Jacquie Maria Wessels’ attentive gaze focused on details she could not encounter elsewhere (e.g., the constant reference to the Catholic religion through images of saints), and she initiates a reflection on the visual and aesthetic repercussions produced when an etrangère’s gaze rests on the landscape and on Italy, on Naples and on a fragment of suspended time.

What does she want to tell us by pursuing photograph after photograph of an elusive environment such as auto repair shops, a world once characterized by human presence and now sometimes replaced by technological intelligence? If the world of yesterday is gradually disappearing, photography is the only medium that can stop it and reinvent it to still negotiate that pact that man makes with places, through the story of a humanity struggling against the disappearance of a memory that is also visual.

“These details, perhaps unknown to most, are able to recompose in the mind an image so strong as to bring us once again into a context that seems to place itself out of time, albeit in a current and recognizable temporality,” comments the curator.

The stories photographed by Wessels also take on a connotation of a female gaze towards the male world; the reality that the photograph captures takes on a meaning different from that indicated by common sense. Therefore, “her photographs equate themselves with abstract paintings, somewhere between the real and imaginary worlds, a happy marriage of reality and abstraction, present moment and memory; straddling the particular of the object and the universal of history; between abstract painting and photography; between poetic vision and anthropological inquiry, between observation and revelation, and presenting themselves as devices of the psychology of the inexorably disappearing mechanical society.”

In addition to the Garage stills series, parts of two other photographic series, Cityscapes and Fringe Nature, will be presented in the exhibition.

For more info about the photographer: https://www.jacquiemariawessels.nl/

Hours: Daily from 9:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m.

Free admission.

Naples, at PAN the still lifes of Jacquie Maria Wessels made in garages around the world

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