The Wind in the Brain

This work of Transfer Polaroid, can be considered as the origin of my following photographic work in digital post-production. THE WIND IN THE BRAIN Between Reality and Fantasy Massimo De Gennaro is an architect by profession. Then he photographs and simultaneously makes photomontages. Finally he loves collage, paints and often intervenes by hand, with colors, on photographs. As always when we find ourselves thinking of different languages that an artist crosses and / or superimposes and then leads them to the expressive unity of the finished work (classic cases of word - image and ceramic - painting, just to exemplify) it is necessary to ascertain the existence of a solid intellectual guiding thread, which motivates an intertwining - always and in any case suggestive - between autonomous disciplines each with its own code and so specific executive practices, to suggest that in the common denominator given by the work they converge cognitive attitudes and creative paths so far apart that they seem difficult to reconcile. Therefore, since from the conceptual point of view it has been agreed that photography is, in itself, that instrument by which it is possible to stop any part of reality in its unity, it will be essential to admit that the photomontage of it (photography) is the exact opposite. As it breaks down and reassembles from different sources and produces an image that is not reality but a semblance of it loaded with more or less subjective and therefore arbitrary meanings. The same game of opposites applies to painting and collage. The one generates from nothing and makes all the immateriality of the fantastic inspiration visible and concrete. The other is clearly the result of an assembly, meditated a posteriori, of physically already existing forms, provided with their (any) original meaning on which the artist intervenes, destructures it and then reassembles it in a new context, with new (and various) expressive and communicative purposes. And here appears a strong, reliable guiding thread: proposed as a summation - witty and allusive, as in the case of De Gennaro's photographic / pictorial work - the four ways (or starting points) described here circumscribe and define effectively and engagingly - both on the level of immediate emotional consent and on that of a more peaceful reflection - a territory of visual research where one comes across truth and likelihood, fantasy and reality, aesthetic intuitions and documentary ability, thought and gestures, ancient knowledge (the queen painting of the arts) and updated technological skills ... all skillfully manipulated, superimposed, ordered, confused and rearranged, not by chance by an architect. 1999 - Text by Carlo Federico Teodoro