Romanticism, an artistic current born at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was the period of revaluation of the sphere of sentiment, passion and irrationality, in other words: of the individual heroic gesture as an affirmation of self and of his will. Romanticism is the movement of great impressions. Through the most striking features of this artistic expression, Federico Cannata’s SUGGESTIONS photographic project is born, which makes us meet the most iconic works of this movement, entering into the collective generational imagination. The works of Ingres, Gericault, Hayez are printed on large paper supports, then physically destroyed, ruined right from the hands of the photographer, through a play of instinct and instinctivity the models like clay slabs still wet, then crumpled prints they are photographed as they appear to us.
Those bodies so fascinating, eternal landscapes of gold and silver tones are made plastic and sentimentally three-dimensional, assume other shapes, shape or even deform hard within our eyes. This photographic series is soaked with an essential element: the sublime, feeling very much felt by both the artists of that season and Cannata. Expressed already in 1700 by Edmund Burke, the sublime considers beautiful what does not arise from the pleasure of beautiful form or from the disinterested contemplation of the object, but which bases its roots in feelings of fear and violence, inflicted by infinity and by the smack. Federico Cannata’s shots send us feelings of decadence and break-up, intentionally provocative, appearing as wind- torn newspaper pages and wandering through the streets or as a letter that is thrown into the rubbish by a resentful writer or as well as the walls of torn houses that show proud signs of the passing time.
This trend leads us to seek in the observer new and disarming, dark and mystical atmospheres: abstract works in their conformity but perfectly recognizable in their essence, which want to give more value to the original work. We live then impressions inhabited by pure feelings. We live potentially destructive moments for our eyes. We live.
