Exhibition: Francesco Zizola – Mare Omnis

Opening: 23.10.2021, 11 am
Exhibition: 26.10. – 27.11.2021
Photography: Francesco Zizola
Text: Claudia Corrent

Mare Omnis is a collection of photographs taken by Francesco Zizola. The exhibition wants to explore through an articulated and complex visual language, the relationship between man and nature and his influence on the sea. Zizola’s sea is a sea of subtraction, in which signs, analogies and things that recall other things emerge. The sea becomes sky and thus becomes a constellation that refers to archetypes at the origin of time.
Drawings, human figures, ancient representations, signs in the night, distant images of a powerful nature in close contact with man all appear in his photos.

As Barthe recalls: “Whatever it shows and in whichever way a photo is always invisible: it is not what you see.”

The constellations in the distance are actually fishing nets in the great Mediterranean Sea. These are nets that the “tonnarotti”, those who take care of the slaughter, install to catch the tuna in their migration towards the coast. The white points are buoys and the silver threads of the strips of water are the tops that secure the floating parts to the seabed.

Zizola chooses to move away from the classic narrative topoi of reportage for another type of image that departs from any referentiality of reality to move towards a poetic and abstract language.

What do we really look at when we see an image? What do our eyes recognize in front of them? These are the questions that we ask ourselves while looking at the photographs of Mare Omnis. There is total ambiguity and Zizola chooses to reflect upon the photographic paradigm, knowing that images have the wonderful task of creating paths of meaning and giving rise to awareness processes in the viewer. Zizola suggests that photographs are not only what they show, they are much more an active part of a process that asks questions and goes beyond the visible and towards the imagination in an internal movement between author and viewer.

“There is an ecstatic and poetic truth. It is mysterious and elusive and can only be achieved through imagination and stylization. Photography has the task of opening new possible understandings of the complexity of reality” comments the photographer on the process that led him to create these images.

The work begun in 2016 and consists of 22 black and white photographs in 90×120 format and narrates the now overturned and lost relationship of man with the sea in its natural form of sustenance. It Is an act of poetic denunciation, an act of love towards the breaking of a balance, and a time when the sea was flourishing with life and the appeal to rediscover the lost relationship with the sacred again.