I began photographing windows in New York while studying Interior Design at Parsons School during summer 2003: those pictures were initially intended as an inspiration archive of window frames, hinting at different interiors and room shapes. But soon I realized that I was interested in nothing other than the windows themselves.
During the past 8 years I have photographed mostly in America and Europe, collecting images of temporary states in which, I believe, chance and perspective concur in making windows transcend their function to acquire aesthetic value and artistic expression.
My work on windows focuses on the window surface, rather than its transparency, in order to shift the attention from nowadays voyeuristic approach to our inner selves, to the pleasure of interpretation, daydream, imagination, and to empathic emotion.
Excluding passage by definition already, windows in my work become two-dimensional objects, their aesthetic integrity in my looking at them and not through them. A collection of stills that seems to bring an Ellsworth Kelly quote I found in Paris in 2008 to its extreme consequence (as written on a wall at Palais de Tokyo: ‘In October 1949, at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, I noticed that the windows interested me more than the art exhibited in the rooms’).
Valentina Angeloni (b. 1978 Milan, Italy) received her MA in Modern Literature and Aesthetics from the University of Milan before moving to New York City in 2006, where she lived and worked until 2010. She is currently based in Milan. Her work has been first exhibited in 2011, with two solo shows in London and Milan, and a collective show in Porto Cervo (Italy).
Weekend portfolio selected by Philippe Garner.
