UN-FAMILIAR POLAROID
The artistic experiments that flank the nine photographs on aluminum of the UN-FAMILIAR series have allowed Mauro Moriconi to dig and delve further into the family universe. The use of the Polaroid is not accidental. Informal, extremely popular, the instant medium always arouses amazement and wonder and allows you to probe the unpredictable, therefore the un-familiar, that is the distinctive trait that lies behind every family unit.
At the base of this work there is both curiosity and the desire to penetrate the magic of the Polaroid, which has become a pop icon since the 1970s. Here then is that the artist comes to break down the photo to analyze and eviscerate the technique, up to grasp its spell. Through delicate and precise phases of cleaning and smoothing, in a skilful alchemical game, Moriconi subtracts various chemical components in order to block the evolutionary process of the image. The intent, the artist reveals to us, is to protect the fragile families portrayed by the inexorable passage of time and by that inevitable aging phenomenon which, if exposed to light, alters this kind of images.
Three series mark the three phases of this research activity, which is then a triple reinterpretation, in which the works are no longer engraved, since the action is carried out on the film through the subtraction of color patinas and levels of definition.
The same collection is re-proposed in the classic and reassuring snapshot format that we all know and with which we have set special moments and framed moments of everyday life.
The second series represents a sort of "positive" of the Polaroid and recalls, for the extraordinary effect of transparency, the chromatic dilutions typical of the glazes of the '400, but also the first works on tissue paper made by the artist from Lucca. The images lose sharpness, time seems to have started to corrode the profiles and wear the surfaces. Faces and landscapes seem to be filtered by dreams or memories, thus referring metatextually to what is perhaps the primary purpose of photography.
In the third series, which is configured as the "negative" of the Polaroid, darker tones prevail and the images, which now take on greater consistency and solidity, recall the bas-reliefs made on bronze tiles between the 15th and 16th centuries. Moriconi also suggests the parallel with the matrices for lithographs or prints, from the shape of which, on paper or other material, different identical impressions are obtained. The idea of a matrix, however, is well connected, thinking of the Latin matrix derivation, to motherhood or, to adhere to the fluidity of the family dimension proposed in these works, to a primitive generative principle on which we are called to question ourselves.
Paola Martini
