Carlo Gallerati presents La Ballerina e altre storie, a solo exhibition by Stefano David curated by Michela Becchis.
The Ballerina and other stories. It is in the word “stories” that the meaning of this exhibition is concentrated. Because it is a narrative, and as such it has a time that can become a sequence or a narrated instant at its climax, yet it must always remain a story. A story in images of a dreamlike immersion, of an intermediate state between sleep and wakefulness, between fairy tale and myth, in which each photograph becomes a workable model that orders the heterogeneous multiplicity of Stefano David’s experience, making it traversable and recognizable to viewers as their own as well. In this work, the elementary structure as well as the fundamental symbolic construction to use Levi-Strauss’s terms is color, which functions as the element that creates the narrative and mythological corpus. Each photograph, while retaining its integrity and autonomy of meaning, becomes a variation on a single story that David leaves free to be told also by the viewer, not so that it may become a banal exercise in unbridled fantasy, but rather so that it may respond to a logical-chromatic construction. Color is not “natural,” it is not in the subject captured in the photograph, but is chosen a posteriori by the artist only after the photograph has been printed is the true “logical operator” (again, to use a tool from Levi-Strauss’s theory) of this project: even when it produces the disorientation to which David’s chromatic choices invite us. A logical operator that also allows the artist to re-enter the space of the photograph he has taken, because color redefines a spatial relationship not only for those who will look at the work, but for David himself, who, by superimposing chromatic planes, disrupts natural space and invents another with its own new logic. In this narrating dialogue among symbols, spaces, and colors, technique reveals itself as part of the content. A photograph is not only an image: it is an object. It is matter generated by traces of light captured by the artist within a precise, carefully considered spatio-temporal frame. La Ballerina e altre storie is thus the light that David’s artistic action stratifies and transposes onto paper, using silver salts to conceive unexpected tonal allusions. (Michela Becchis)
Stefano David was born in Rome to a Greek mother and an Italian father. Between the late 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, he specialized as a photographer and printer of analog photography; later he also deepened his knowledge of historical printing techniques. He studied the hand-coloring of black-and-white photographs and experimented with analog printing using emulsion on different materials (glass, wood, cement), creating photographic murals. He has been featured in various festivals, such as FotoGrafia Festival Internazionale di Roma, Festival della Creatività (Fortezza da Basso, Florence), Sguardi Sonori (Rome), and has taken part in solo and group exhibitions in numerous Italian and international galleries, including Galleria Fondaco (Rome), Galleria Santa Cecilia (Rome), Accademia delle Arti SantaGiulia (Brescia), Vhs-photogalerie (Stuttgart), and La Cave (Rome). In the early years of his artistic research and his study of photographic techniques, he was director of the visual arts section of the Roman self-managed space Brancaleone.
Stefano David : La Ballerina e altre storie
March 6 – April 8, 2026
Galleria Gallerati
Via Apuania, 55
00162 Rome, Italy
www.galleriagallerati.it
