Pattern Room
Group exhibition
Wednesday 30 April 2008 at 7.00 p. m., the photographic exhibition Pattern Room. Photographs by Roxanne Lowit and Giuseppe Varchetta, and a text written by Marco Belpoliti, will open at the Collezione Maramotti. The title of the exhibition is openly, deliberately evocative.
It is also reminiscent of the old function of the room in which the exhibition has been prepared: the design and creation of prototypes and models, when the building was Max Mara production site.
The exhibition is connected to the Fotografia europea (European photography) event, organised by the city council; this year, in its third edition, it is presenting the theme of the body and its multi-sensoriality.
The images by Roxanne Lowit and Giuseppe Varchetta offer two different viewpoints that document and interpret the intriguing relationship among the body of works, artists and visitors within the exhibition space, in shots taken during the opening of the collection. The exhibition aims to highlight this complex system of relationships of forces and energy that is heightened in these mutual reflections.
A critical text by Marco Belpoliti accompanies and comments the work of the two photographers, offering a reflection on the author-work-visitor triangle and the role of the photographer.
Roxanne Lowit’s shots centre on bodies, transforming the artist into an icon facing his own work, or “stealing” unusual confidences between artist and the artwork in a play of free and elegant narration. The photographer declares: “The nine photographs portray not only artists, their works and Muses, but also people and visitors interacting with works on display, as they are caught in the flash of a moment – the interaction between the camera and the subjects, the artist and the inspiration, between me and you. I have fully come back to “patterns” (“models”, “fantasies”, “drawings”), as I had started my career as fabric designer. I was happily led astray by a camera, which today is bringing me back to the “modelleria”, the place where one time models were cut and creativity still flows freely”.
The rigorously black and white images by Giuseppe Varchetta show rarefied spaces yet laden with meaning, and focus on the subtle energies running between bodies affecting each other: the bodies of the visitors and those of the artworks, offering us unprecedented identities of the works themselves, as they are renewed each time by the different perceptions of the onlooker.