Immaginare by Italian photographer Oliviero Toscani, a Swiss first at the m.a.x. museo in Chiasso Switzerland, offers an overview of more than fifty years of his professional life. The exhibit – included in Bi10, the 10th Biennale dell’Immagine – deals with the issue of imagination.
Toscani focuses “on imagining as an act of conscious choice in the photographer’s craft”, as the curators of the exhibition Susanna Crisanti and Nicoletta Ossanna Cavadini say. “He has always been distinguished among creatives and visionaries for his ability to advance (…) research into discovery, using transgression as a provocation”, which he thinks of as “forces belonging to art, making diversity a value against conformity for the sake of the free expression of communication”.
Essential features of his work – from the very beginning to now – are “his creativity and his ability to imagine the result desired before snapping it, conceptually constructing the photographic act”, according to Ossanna Cavadini (director of m.a.x. museo), who stresses how he represents “a reality that is different because visionary”.
Actually an interesting visual heritage is on at the m.a.x. from early pictures (50 vintage unpublished images, including some from his first field trips), created while Toscani was attending the Kunstgewerbeschule in Zurich to his later campaigns, revealing his spirit of research and his social and revolutionary commitment.
The exhibit shows his whole output thanks to photographic images displayed and projected in an “immersive” system: a kind of infinite series made up of more than 20.000 photos.
His photos used to be scandals. They “are scandalous because they place what no one wants to see before everyone’s eyes (…)”. But his famous shock campaigns include “sweetness, the strong and fragile feelings of solidarity and give and take, the power of civil art”, the Italian journalist Francesco Merlo states.
On stage also 72 images from various ad campaigns for United Colors of Benetton and 39 issues of the world’s global magazine Colors (1991-2000), devised and edited by Toscani, who for decades has been devising campaigns on major contemporary topics of social interest, like those concerning death penalty, Aids, anorexia, violence against women…
As Angela Madesani recalls, Oliviero Toscani delivered an address to the Art Director’s Club in New York and the D&AD Art Directors Club in London, a kind of programmatic manifesto: “Creativity is a surplus of energy, intelligence and sensibility, it is that possibility which lies between heart and brain. (…) Creativity must be visionary, subversive, disturbing. (…) it also has to be innovative, push ideas and concepts, question stereotypes and old modules. Creativity takes energy and courage.”
The Immaginare exhibition at m.a.x. museo “dialogues” with the town of Chiasso: indeed some one hundred large photos are on display outside the front entrance of the museum and in the main Corso San Gottardo. They are a selection of the Razza Umana still ongoing project (in cooperation with the United Nation Human Rights, Stand Up For Human Rights), with portraits of people from all over the world all belonging to the human race. Complexity, sense of belonging or of strangeness are typical of our world. As the idea of borders is traditionally inherent to Chiasso, that divides and connects Italy and Switzerland, the 10th Biennale dell’Immagine was focused on the issue of problems and values of borderlines.
Paola Sammartano
Paola Sammartano is a journalist specialized in arts and photography based in Milan, Italy.
Oliviero Toscani, Immaginare
Through February 4, 2018
m.a.x. museo ICOM
via Dante Alighieri 6
6830 Chiasso
Switzerland
www.centroculturalechiasso.ch/m-a-x-museo
Catalogue: Éditions d’Art Albert Skira, Geneva, 2017.
