One often wonders what art is. It is legitimate to question words when they correspond to multiple interpretations or when they are evoked excessively. Or when they simply do not agree with us, rather the opposite. Here is the word that knocks at our doors, putting us in relation with the other, in discussion. Without the other, we have a painting, a photograph, a support, a material, a gesture, but we do not have the word, we do not have art. Thus, the word expresses itself in relation, and not in the object. In fact, the object serves to manifest and objectify it. For example, Van Gogh's famous shoes "become" art, and thus word, at the moment when Heidegger, Derrida, or Lacan, or we ourselves here and now, support a meaning. We can say that art exists as long as there is relation. Without a counterpart, there is only matter, an unreciprocated call. Therefore, art acquires life in its experience of meaning through the word, even when silent.
In a series of photographs by Francesco Federico Natalucci, we see a call. Gazes stumbling upon ruins. A silent facade of a house, a tree caught by the sun, and again, a pair of women’s shoes that speak to us of waiting, of a desire to wear the time that presses upon us and consumes us, yet here they lie intense, unworn; a jacket hanging, seemingly abandoned but suspended when viewed through the author’s lens; the frozen gesture of a statue, an empty staircase. The element that interprets the intention well, "the call" of the author, is represented by a clock, more precisely the still hands of a clock. Time stands still. Almost a pleading against the relentless fragility of reality and its decay. Here is Natalucci’s cry filtered through the ruins of a familiar territory. Here is the artist’s self-portrait. It is in the moment we recognize it that we become aware of its transformative power. For we are no longer ourselves; we are "else", or better yet, we are the other. Thus, metamorphosis occurs in language; by making the words of art our own, we become world more than knowing it, we glimpse eternity. In that instant, we are not in time; we are time.
The photographer Francesco Federico Natalucci writes, The ruins, the contemplation of the uninhabited, tell of something that will not return, that is slowly fading away, in a slow and apathetic apocalypse that silently is incapable of giving credence to human meaning and dreams, and that mute, slipping out of memory, forces us to reflect on our fragility. To reflect on fragility, which is a temporality, a passage. This is the concern. And all images, in fact, are this: a braking of time, like the trace of tires on asphalt, the real challenging reality, distorting it.
