Paola Mattioli’s photography sees reality in brief imaginative epiphanies, where representation is a literary note, the sedimentation of an idea, a memory, a vision that becomes verse for images. In the portrait, the instrument of sight tells “a story, a tale, a responsibility, an attitude, a question, a partiality, a subtle distance, a text” (Paola Mattioli, L’infinito nel volto dell’altro, Mimesis, Milan 2023, p. 5). The gaze brings each shot closer to a sentimental dimension that enhances the senses, making the image witness to extraordinary visual exceptions that write history. A photogram is a world of knowledge, of intimacy, of friendship, of affection, where every emotional barrier falls and a deep and luminous attention vibrates towards the whole world of imagination, fantasy and visionaryism, which has so much to do with the realm of words.
Raffaella Perna’s intense contribution at the end of the aforementioned volume underlines this:
“The word has played a crucial role in Paola Mattioli’s photographic career since 1970, when, as a young woman, she was commissioned by the publisher Luigi Majno to portray Giuseppe Ungaretti for an editorial project designed to bring poetry and the visual arts into dialogue. Soon afterwards, word and image would take on new contours for Mattioli in the series Immagini del No (1974), in which the many ‘no’ votes that appeared on the walls and monuments of Milan on the occasion of the referendum on the abolition of the divorce law are the origin of a photographic narrative in which writing and image are inextricably intertwined, giving consistency to the iconic quality of the word and the narrative value of the photographs. It is, in fact, a series of images that go beyond the limits of documentary photography to arrive at logo-iconic results close to the experiences of visual and concrete poetry and the photo-textual intersections of conceptual art experiments”. (Raffaella Perna, Autoritratto di una fotografa, in Paola Mattioli, op.cit., p. 101)
Word and image happily mingle, and mutually construct the zeitgest of our ever-changing and perpetual present through a language that is flexible and welcoming, sensually fluid in its deliberate indeterminacy. Each image is a story of visual words that question the sense of perception in favour of a sentimental emphasis on reality. Beyond the given exists the space of poetry, capable of giving new meaning to appearance, illusion and truth beyond the tangible datum of word and image. Expressive freedom that Paola Mattioli sought throughout her artistic, political and social life, with an unwavering passion and determination that still make her a girl of the 1960s in search of her own impalpable chimeras.
Choosing a sequence with Paola is not only a unique opportunity to be in close contact with her modus operandi, but also a token of affection that moves me and confirms that her passion for photography is as intact and strong as ever, and that each adventure is tackled with a scrupulousness and attention to detail that make her a true example of her profession.
“The sequence is a very rich tool, even if not very codified; it holds together assonance and dissonance, alternates solids and voids, loves small variations, steals rhythm from music and proceeds in a way similar to poetry; it can relate to editing in cinema, arrangement in art, the succession of pages in a book of photographs or their linear development along the walls of an exhibition space. I have often turned to writing – literary, historical, non-fiction, poetic – to steal its internal mechanisms and try to transfer them to photography. I have looked most of all at works that interweave different planes of language because the overlapping and intersecting of planes makes, it seems to me, everything richer and more varied as in a kind of kaleidoscope, in which one plane illuminates the other, without too many explicit explanations: from all of them it is possible to deduce an architecture, a trend. (…) Each picture can be considered a word, and by juxtaposing words, small sentences are constructed, and by moving picture-words, the meaning changes dramatically, like film editing; I never quite know what to make of a single photograph; photographs call each other, by juxtaposition or dissonance, in a somewhat secret and complex way, difficult to codify, that makes me think of Bateson when he explained to his daughter that two facts add up, but ideas or thoughts cannot add up, they can only be ‘combined’. (Paola Mattioli, La Sequenza. Ritratti 1970 – 2020, op.cit, pp. 20 – 21).
In her enchanting home-studio nestled in the heart of the most beautiful and hidden Milan, surrounded by paintings and stacks of photo boxes, I see laid out on the large table – which is the real protagonist of the room – the photos, which Paola first stacks and orders with great care and then arranges waiting for them to be combined almost by alchemical magic. All this is interspersed with repeated stops for hot chips and cool white wine.
Light and dark, full and empty, contrast and soft, like a metronome, are the constants of this unprecedented and shared choice, then “Cellophane/I” of 1973 – 1979 where the vision of the surrounding world is filtered through a plastic screen of imperturbable indifference towards human facetiousness, and “Quanto tumulto è la luce” of 1990, a superb exercise on the infinite gradations of grey through the light diffusing a lamp. And again, “Abbiamo visto” from 1999 with a disturbing pile of female mannequin heads softly stacked inside unadorned baskets, flanked by one of the 1974 “Immagini del No” which peremptorily recounts how the passions of a cause affect the skin of cities.
The alienating abstract geometries of “I piani superiori” of 1979 that couple with “Autoritratto” of 1977, where Paola is a swaying silhouette armed only with a camera that illuminates our souls and opens our eyes to a different way of seeing the world. The blinding white of a free brushstroke in ‘Carcere / 9’ from 1999 – 2001 contrasts with the black of “L’onda /4” from 1990 that overwhelms our senses of perception.
“Eclissi / 4” is an astral photograph that Paola Mattioli took on 11 August 1999 in Sant’Anna di Stazzema:
“the Tuscan village where in 1944 the retreating Germans slaughtered five hundred and sixty people. (…) The leaves wrapped in the trellis – juxtaposed, intertwined with each other in random contacts – form many small holes that become dark chambers. Many, many dark chambers that project innumerable small eclipses all around. The sun and the moon sent us the image of themselves directly from the sky, becoming themselves the authors of an extraordinary astral photo. In the next day’s “Manifesto”, in a comment by Marco D’Eramo, I read this sentence: ‘For the first time in many years, what we are witnessing was not the eclipse of reason, but an eclipse of the sun, at once poignant and rational. “Eclipse of reason, eclipse of the sun’ right in Sant’Anna di Stazzema”. (Paola Mattioli, Una fotografia astrale. “Eclissi”, 1999, op.cit, p. 80).
“Capolavoro / 3″ of 2003 is the first image that comes to mind, linked to the theme of looking as posture. (…) In this case, my photographic gaze does not meet another gaze in direct, vis à vis, but reactivates the gaze that is clustered there, stratified: the gaze of the worker who welded it and made it visible to me, the result of his “masterpiece” and its visual aspect that I record and bring to light”. (Paola Mattioli, Dare immagine. “Capolavoro” 2003, op.cit, p. 18)
The fantasy, the beauty, the audacity of the mind free of ties and restraints that sees the infinite beyond the wall of reality, is what we find in the shot entitled “Ospedale Psichiatrico di Trieste / 2” of 1973, while the useless and abysmal loneliness of imprisonment in the two hands clutching the bars of “Carcere / 7” of 1999 – 2001.
In “Cellophane / 10” from 1973 – 1979, the impossibility of showing reality unambiguously is tangible. Too many elements stand between what is and what appears, and so it is better to see those appearances that we manage to glimpse between one obstacle and another, splinters of the real, epiphanies of memory, illuminations of the soul.
Words are no longer able to say what we want, they are now obliterated by ephemeral events that sweep everything away in their invasive intrusion. “F3V” of 2002 tells of this impossibility to express oneself, which becomes silence or perhaps a mute and desperate scream.
Paola Mattioli’s hands are the protagonists of ‘Shanghai Express / 9’ (2005), the gesture that “has its meaning” for every photographer and for her too.
“Hidden from the other’s gaze by the camera, it is probably the movement of the hand that offers itself to the eye and accompanies the temporal flow marked by the shot: it narrates the whole series of interruptions, of the salient movements in which the photographer believes to be getting close to a result; and they press on – continue – don’t know – try again – speed up – press on again… and suddenly stop. Finished. It seems to have something to do with performance, that time of photographing, which is not necessarily the aggressive time of the shoot; it can be a quiet time, or a happy time, or a tiring time, which in any case responds to the internal musicality of the photographer/photographed relationship”. (Paola Mattioli, Le mani. “Shangai Express” 2005, Op.cit, p. 51).
Reality bends to a creativity that decomposes the sensible datum between what it sees and what it remembers, between the moment and a memory of dazzling visual and spiritual essentiality, embodied in the monochrome graphism of “Jaipour” (1995) and the perceptive relativism of “Doppio sguardo” (1972), where a lens poses the question of how fragile and ephemeral is the condition of what exists in itself from what our gaze sees through the senses, between concreteness and appearance, between truth and illusion.
The last photo of 2002, which Paola Mattioli tenderly called “Chiamami Stella / 2”, depicts a dusting of coloured plastic magnetic letters that are displayed in their happy chaos on her refrigerator, reminding her and all of us, that images are memories of a present now past, of a transience that we can perhaps freeze with the immortal beauty that we feel and see in the dawn of an emotion.
Milan 16 May 2024
