In the recent year works, Gianluca Rona's photographic eye has been pinned on a
well-defined and coherent urban landscape, that of the neighborhoods and social
housing units that arose throughout Italy between the Second World War and the
years of the economic boom. . The urgent need for post-war reconstructions on the
one hand and the desire to offer the working class decent living environments suitable
for social progress on the other, had given rise to the outskirts of cities - alongside
those factories that represent the cathedrals of the twentieth century - towers and
barracks, large beehives where masses of people can be gathered, attracted by
promises of hygiene and comfort.
History has also taught us that those environments have not always turned out to be
intimately healthy, and that sometimes the price paid for a decent home has resulted
in isolation and loss of identity for the occupant.
There are two revisiting operations through which the young Rona intervenes on
today's urban landscape of economic houses where neglect, lack of maintenance,
carelessness have also removed any possible residual memory of good quality of the
original projects: in the face of the greyness, anonymity, of the flat aesthetic
conformism that makes every surface opaque and uniform, his photographic eye
operates an action of redemption from the banal, of unveiling, eliminates the patina
and gives life to the colors, makes the stamps sing and the give brightness to the
contrasts. The switching on of the light then has the power to highlight the geometries
of the buildings, bring out the design of orthogonal and parallel lines that run through
the wall faces and divide the facades as in a Mondrian painting, delimiting clear
backgrounds of color.
Where before a sloppy uniformity, randomness and disorder reigned, now order,
balance, cohesion of harmonious realities dominate each other despite their
heterogeneous different identity.
