By looking up to the sky… one feels a sense of disorientation… that landmarks are dissolved… and overcome with feeling of abandonment and freedom.
I chose to indirectly portray reality through its reflection. As in the past when I caught the life of Stromboli through the signs left on the walls and along the black sand I, then, wandered around the towns, wearing my camera round my neck, spontaneously and intuitively started to portray what is on the earth through its corresponding reflection in the sky. I had fun, using a wide-angle lens, to tidily assemble and disassemble on two-dimensional surface, through graphic and geometric patterns, the three-dimensional reality, polluted and affected by the devastating human intervention that has invaded the architectural environment with cars, motorbikes, rubbish, road signs, and whatever horror it is possible to imagine. The central aim I set for myself was to show everyone the innate beauty still present in the buildings, the statues and the architectures especially in of the towns of Tuscany.
To immerse oneself in the original splendour of the past but through a contemporary way of seeing, which results in a combination of the past, present and future. I experience very strong sensations each time I direct my camera towards the sky, when I see the lines run towards infinity and I feel an extraordinary sense of freedom. To shift the viewpoint signifies to break a habit, to break a habit signifies to widen our self-conscience, to stretch our imagination to the limit, towards the unknown. By glancing up it is possible to view a reality, which is always present but that we are normally unaware of, just because habit makes us blind. By looking at reality from this point of view, which is not the only one, but just one of the possibilities, I continued my research, starting in Florence, my hometown, then in the other beautiful towns of Tuscany and also beyond the boundaries, Aix en Provence, Barcelona, New York… my exploration continues, I am imagining the possibilities that could emerge by glancing up to the tops of the Dolomiti or to the roofs of the “trulli” in Apulia...considering also human beings as buildings, how they look like from different perspectives and unusual angle shots…how does the infinity show itself through Nature?
How does the sky appear filtered through the branch and leaves of a centuries-old oak…
Gaetano Gentile
