exhibition curated by Elena Volpato
The GAM is pleased to present, as part of the SECONDA RISONANZA, an exhibition curated by Elena Volpato, dedicated to the films of Giosetta Fioroni, preserved in the Videoteca collection. This is the nineteenth installment in the series of exhibitions through which the GAM has been telling the story of the first season of Italian artist films and videos from the 1960s and 1970s.
Giosetta Fioroni made four films, all in 1967. For some years now, she had already been using cinema and TV images in her paintings; using industrial silver enamel paint, she crafted ephemeral visions – apparitions of light that flickered like fleeting impressions on a white screen. Her works often depicted female faces, frozen in time, framed and repeated, resembling luminous traces of film frames in silver salts.
The exhibition opens with one of these paintings, La ragazza della TV, from 1964, housed in the GAM collections as part of Eugenio Battisti’s Experimental Museum. This painting captures a woman’s profile, defined through a resist process against a silver background, as she arranges her hair. Fioroni’s images always acknowledge their status as images of images—reflections upon reflections—figures engaged in acts of self-observation: applying makeup, adjusting their hair, posing for the camera, or seeking the gaze of another.
The female and male figures that appear in the four screened films share this essence. They are spectral, insubstantial, existing on the verge of vanishing. The absence of sound intensifies their elusiveness, stripping them of definitive meaning. They appear to be characters incapable of becoming a person, if not through the force of the will to act, so fragile as constantly to seek something that circumscribes them, that can affirm their form: the embrace of a partner, the frame of a mirror, a white screen against which to rest or even just a head covering that circumscribes the features of the face in a line.
Fioroni's films search for stark contrasts: deep blacks carve out voids, while whites dissolve edges, softening forms. Light and shadow caress her subjects, their features always on the brink of dissolution. Eyes, lips, cheekbones emerge only momentarily, as if about to melt into fluid stains. In Solitudine femminile the face of Giulia Niccolai, writer and photographer, is streaked with tears. It seems to be suspended on the screen like water on glass. Her person is also mediated by several diaphragms that make it unreal: the lens of the camera, the make-up on her face, the glint of her headdress and jewellery, the plane of the mirror on which the camera seeks her portrait. They are all surfaces that burn with light and dissipate the image.
One of the four films, Goffredo, is dedicated to Parise, Fioroni's companion. It is a silent biography, made up of photographs, books and magazines. After the first shots of his childhood and youth, we see the cover of his first novel, Il ragazzo morto e le comete of 1951. This is followed by photos of the American culture he wrote about and some images of Fellini, with whom Parise collaborated on Boccaccio ’70 and 8½. Then there are oriental portraits that accompany the cover of Cara Cina, a collection of future articles written for Il Corriere della Sera. Although the writer is present and real in the artist's life, the silent and monochrome frames project the narrative into an affective elsewhere, onto a screen of the heart, where time has passed and life is a memory.
Fioroni once described her work: “I was searching for lightness, almost like an old sequence by the Lumière brothers from cinema’s earliest days—something that simply passes [...], something that conveys a sense of the tremulous, of extreme delicacy for the viewer: an apparition, a fading.”
