Monica Silva

Charles Baudelaire

In the contemporary cultural context, the affiliation of photography with the world of art is well established. That it is an expressive medium independent of any other form of artistic expression is equally certain. Yet the photographic still image of a setting that we recognize as belonging to the world of painting continues to leave us bewildered.

And if the operation recalls the production of one of the most celebrated Italian painters, then the estrangement is even more pronounced. Points of reference immediately jump and our mind travels fast in search of a process of recognition, capable of bringing the gaze back to an acceptable degree of balance.

This is the first feeling, the first reaction in front of "Lux et Filum" by Monica Silva. This visual research interprets or rather rereads, the work of Caravaggio in the contemporary show: that of a photograph that dialogues with the staging, with the construction of an idea and the definition of a point of view.

Having regained a foothold, it is immediately apparent that the appeal of these photographs lies in the complexity of an interweaving of expressive registers from different eras and sensibilities. Magically, and despite the long excursus, the result is not accumulation but synthesis and clarity. In short, Monica Silva's is an operation in which past and present meet in a common iconographic symbology, whose classical matrix lives again in incredibly unprecedented lights and colours, possible only thanks to the technological dimension of today's photography.

To better delve into the artistic concept, it is worth reiterating that "Lux et Filum" traces a path through images in which symbol and citation follow the rhythm of creation and extravagance. Opening the sequence is "The Supper at Emmaus," which marks the entrance to Caravaggio's reinvented world where the roles are immediately reversed and the sets relocated in soft, diffuse light. Here, the good shepherd, the resurrected Christ of the sacred scriptures, takes the form of a beautiful woman who invites the diners to dinner. Her body stretched forward, although following the Caravaggesque composition aimed at directing the viewer's eye to the heart of the scene, takes on a new expressive connotation, charged with sensuality and light nonchalance. From this image on, and throughout the series, nothing more than a vague memory remains of the seventeenth-century aura of sacredness, stimulated by the desecrating contrast with contemporary culture.

Beyond the initial disorientation suggested by the eloquent web of languages and symbolic registers, "Lux et Filum" stretches its critical plane and brings attention back to the historical reflection of the photographic medium and its expressive evolution. Image after image, the focus shifts to the path that the Marvellous Invention had to take before it became the photography we all know today: the most versatile and democratic tool of communication.

This project naturally leads to reflection on the comparison between painting and photography. And not only on the distance, cultivated over time, between the two instruments of artistic expression, but also on the historical diatribe and, in particular, on that fateful 1859, when for the first time, and by the concession of the Ministry of Fine Arts in Paris, the annual painting Salon hosted pictorialist photographic works in the Champs-Elysées Palace. On that same occasion of announced change in the world of arts and culture, Charles Baudelaire wrote the invective against the entry of photography into the empyrean of official arts:

Reading this text today is like diving into a past so distant that it is very often ignored, caught up as we are by the enormous amount of images and photographs that daily populate every field of our lives. Resuming the ancient custom of the simulation of the "pictorial" becomes, then, an invitation to reflect on the way we communicate, express ourselves and think. It is as if Monica Silva with "Lux et Filum" wants to call attention to photography that conveys messages and feelings, focusing on the symbol as the pivot point of thinking, reflecting on art and its freest and most penetrating tools.