Creative - NOMINEE: Vincenzo Russo

I grew up in San Giorgio a Cremano, a small town on the slopes of Vesuvius, the volcano that dominates the Gulf of Naples. I spent my childhood and adolescence playing football under the statues found in Pompeii and Herculaneum, in the shadow of the noble palaces full of references to classical and neoclassical models of beauty. From these places the western man rediscovered, in the nineteenth century, the canons of beauty of antiquity: the measure, the proportion, the balance. Here in the restaurants, in the hotels in the gardens of private homes, one can easily come across what are humble reproductions in plaster of Roman or Greek statues. From 2015 to 2017 I traveled all over Italy looking for sites that re-produce these statues. These factories reflect the new approach to the beauty of our society. It is a beauty reproduced in series. The unsold copies of the same model accumulate along the perimeter walls of the place of production. Stacked around these walls of color, they are deprived of any context, they remain suspended in an indefinite, timeless place. The title of the project, "Hic et Nunc", refers to the definition that Walter Benjamin gave of art in his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction". The independence of the work from the artist's manual, the possibility of being reproduced mechanically, deprives it of its aura, of its being "here and now" (hic et nunc), and inserts it within a context of consumption . With this image I tried to put ourselves in front of a question, an enigma. Can we give an indication of the value that today, in contemporary society, we give to beauty starting from the contemplation of these pictures?

About author:
Born in Naples in 1989. I approache cinema at a young age, acquiring through the years a passion for the image which will transfer onto my activity as a photographer and videomaker. From September 2013 till June 2014 I attend the annual photography course at the Centro di Fotografia Indipendente in Naples, under the supervision of photographer Mario Spada. Since February 2015, I have taken part in Antonio Biasiucci’s Laboratorio Irregolare, developing a photographic project that delves into the theme of the reproducibility of works of art.