Massimo Vitali at Marianne Boesky - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Before he began showing his photo works in the early `90 Massimo Vitali worked for many years as a photojournalist and cinematographer. This background perhaps sheds a certain quantity of light on his esthetic. In his first U solo the Italian artist showed five large color works (including single diptych) that present sweeping views of Italian beaches. however his aren't exactly glamorous tourist shots: he pick outs crowded, run-of-the-mill beaches, most of which gaze like they're getting pushed into the sea by dint of nearby industrialization and development.

discharge from an 18-foot tripod that Vitali plants several yards on the outside in the water, the photos have a voyeuristic quality. a certain quantity of show people lying sardine-like, shoulder to shoulder upon their towels, with umbrellas and beach paraphernalia squeez in among them. In other discharges people are slightly more spread without The compositions vary according to Vitali's perspective--straight upon or angled so that the beach stretches to the horizon. In individual work, the beach fills greatest in quantity of the frame while the pale grayish-blue water solely borders the composition across the bottom. In others, the sea slices [i]or[/i] part of to the other the image diagonally, the densely populated beach upon one side contrasting with the scattered bathers in the opaque amethystine water on the other.

Although the make subordinates typically become part of an anonymous, teeming mass of humanity, unfortunate individuals captured at les than flattering angles and instants sometimes stand out from the concourse In one scene a multitude of people have their heads tilted back, hands shading their organ of sights as if watching an air present to view One man in the foreground, however, gazes back at the camera. His gaze gives you that uneasy feeling of being caught staring.

Like certain 19th-century exhibitions of bathers, such as Seurat's Bathers at Asnieres, Vitali's work captures city dwellers at leisure. nevertheless his images have an ominous quality not seen a hundred ago. His subjects frolic in the shadows of industrial plants, seemingly unaware of their have a title to complicity in the degradation of the surrounding landscape. Although political easy in mind can be read into these photos, it is their able-bodied compositions and panoramic expanses that linger greatest in quantity in the mind.

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