INFINITE SEA WOODS
A job that comes from childhood, when, after the winter
storms, with my grandfather, we used to collect wood brought from the sea on
the beach, which was cut and left to dry and then burned in the stove the
following season.
These types of wood have always intrigued me: unknown trunks
which, when cut, turned out to be coloured, from scented red to odorless ash
grey, externally homogeneous, bleached by the saltiness, sometimes encrusted
with small forms of life which evoked fantasies about who knows how long ago
and which routes and currents had made them wander across the sea from unknown
places. Other times planks with rusty bolts perhaps brought to the sea by
swollen rivers and only later the colored wood of boats always found on the
beaches or recovered from old disused boats, now increasingly rare.
Each piece of wood
tells a story.
As a photographer I have portrayed them in every way: in the
studio, on the beach at the moment of discovery but my intimate perception
evoked by their essence was not satisfied by the mere photographic image. The
right intuition came after several attempts with the help, yes, of photography
but also of carpenter's equipment.
I photographed the pieces of wood and with them I made a
frame, imperfect but protagonist, which frames the photograph of itself, a
unique and unrepeatable composition, with its enclosed and unknown secret. Over
the years (now more than ten) the work has evolved both from the point of view
of shapes rather than geometries and color. At the beginning the woods were the
4 of the frame photographed on a black background, slowly the realization of
the image changed by repeating the frame endlessly in continuous concentric
'requadrage'.
