The works through which Carlo Cantini explored the metamorphic dimension of the body through movement and colour at the beginning of the 80s, represent only one of the paths taken by this artist during a lengthy career marked by incessant research. In his photography Cantini has always attempted to interpret new relationships between the image and its potential recording, calling into play the points of observation, subjects and technologies as flexible and complementary elements. Thus, the works collected under the epic title The Third Ship and other similar pieces from this period, are variations, though not the only exceptions, in the overall scenario of Cantini’s production. On the other hand, a discordant note is created when Pupi’s works are read solely on one plane, owing to the fragmentation and reconstruction of the image into a three-dimensional geometry which has, in time, become a specific characteristic of the artist, perhaps even his most distinctive trait. In the works of Pupi, photography has long since abandoned the reassuring borders of the frame. It has become an architecture, a subject which interacts with the environment: bodies, landscapes and other subjects which require the eye of the observer to complete their form; a mobile form without coordinates or defined results, open to all possible outcomes.

In both cases the two artists focus on the transformation of the image. In capturing an instant from the process under-way, Carlo Cantini manages to condense the intensity of a single movement into one snap. Pupi instead triggers off a transformation after having caught the image, by creating reverberations in space.

The photos taken by Cantini almost four decades ago have now been reprinted and mounted on Pupi’s flexible and polyhedric plates. The result is a multiplication of the perceptive disorientation which the former and the latter produce autonomously. The encounter of these two artists has had surprising but not completely unpredictable results, given Carlo’s unceasing vitality and Roberto’s experimental vocation, and such results solicit a reflection in our way of perceiving art. Revisiting a work of art and up-dating it, means placing oneself inside the field of secular theoretical speculation concerning production and post-production; it means questioning everything already said about the instruments currently used to read and to analyse an image in a study which considers both the medium and the historical period. In light of this, the work carried out by these two artists as a pair, forces the observer to define new, alternative aesthetic categories in order to position this particular experience of seeing from other viewpoints, thus requiring yet another creative act, that of interpretation.

Pietro Gagliano