Galerie Catherine & André Hug presents, as part of the PhotoSaintGermain festival, an exhibition by Italian artist Costanza Gastaldi entitled Loto Nero.
This artistic project was born from a solitary trip in September 2018 in the Huangshan Mountains located in the eastern provinces of China.
The title of this photographic series is directly inspired by the peak of the Lotus, which is the highest point of the massif. On the other hand, since ancient Egypt, the lotus is associated with the rebirth, dropping its petals at night, in the morning to open up to the emerging light with a “new crown”. It is clear that Loto Nero’s duality is characteristic of the lotus flower, which takes the form of an existential and introspective search for the enigma of death and the feeling of melancholy it arouses.
The exhibition consists of six prints in gravure grain made by the art master Fanny Boucher (Atelier Hélio’g). The rediscovery of this original photographic technique gives Loto Nero a deep aesthetic where blacks are magically highlighted in different degrees, very vivid and resonant, to overcome the modest and adulterated tones that create uniformity and flatness.
In Loto Nero, tormented conifers dance; they respond to the erratic movements of the mist with the same grace that one feels from classical paintings. But if these images look like paintings, it is, in a sense, better to be photographs: Costanza Gastaldi has to cultivate, in each of his series, an ambiguity that undermines the “purity” genres to capture the interpretive and fictional power of photography without negating its specificity.
Costanza Gastaldi: Nero Loto
from November 6 to December 14, 2019
Catherine and André Hug Gallery
40, rue de Seine / 2, rue de l’Échaudé 75006 Paris
