SENSITIVE TRUTH

Furio Torracchi’s hybrid and deconstructive photography

  Furio Torracchi trained as a painter but has now also taken up photography. He deeply questions both categories and keeps exploring the possibilities of both mediums. Hybridity is a characteristic of his artistic labour informed by academic instruction. The artist’s formal subversion is found in the way he poses contemporary questions as to the lack of purity in the fields of art. Torracchi’s paintings are informed by a wealth of visual elements from popular culture. In his landscape or his urban scenes, the faceless characters are reminiscent of cartoons and advertisements that the artist has reworked and reinvented. The paintings retain a simplification without ever succumbing to established clichés, and also exude a subtle Latin temperament in humour and attitude. His work aims to portray the sense of isolation of the human condition within the anonymity of modern life. One of his paintings is a collage where a human form appears to jump out of the Cartesian limits of the canvas’ flatness, daring to question the work of art’s support and its limits. This metaphoric jump represents the artist’s emancipation from just making paintings.

  Torracchi’s painting is created by the addition of paint over an empty surface where as the photography is an act of subtraction (i.e. a flat rectangular image is extracted from our three dimensional and temporal reality). Photography is a subverted reality for Torracchi as it isn’t taken directly from life because the source material he chooses is created by someone else and so it’s contradictory in its origins. However this predatory appropriation is violated further because in the moment of capturing the image, he selects a powerful close-up thus isolating and cropping a specific part of the original photograph. At the same time the shutter closes, the artist slightly shakes the camera consequently blurring the outlines and so removing the clarity. As a result of these two tactics a radical deconstruction of the original image takes place and so the links with reality are shattered. References are almost nullified and the meanings even cancelled. At a formal level the amorphous shapes and vibrant colours are unrecognizable and so an element of abstraction is introduced.

  Torracchi breaks down photographic codes in an attempt to free the medium from being an allusion to a specific space and time. The representational aspect is diffused and the resulting opacity makes the actual physical object the focus of attention. The impact of this direct experience is phenomenological and leaves the viewer visually seduced. The spectator fluctuates between gazing upon the image as a whole and peering at it with closer scrutiny. The rich colours, tonal ranges and vivid luminosity have been developed by the artist in order to generate a powerfully sensitive reaction. With this emphasis on visual effect rather than representation the result provokes an aesthetic pleasure and so an instant sense of inner contemplation can bloom. Despite the near-abstract simplicity of the picture the photograph works at many levels, so that there are other kinds of responses. In fact the loss of references could seduce the viewer’s mind because readings seem enigmatic when the image depicted defies immediate recognition. Without underestimating his intelligence the spectator’s intuition is solicited.

  What unifies Torracchi’s diverse creative output are the questions he asks about the nature of the visual arts. He seems to be more interested in expressing a poetic feeling through them than exploring abstraction and the relationship between colour and form. Using the processes of cropping and blurring Torracchi simultaneously deconstructs, signifies and elaborates to create not just a purely abstract composition but an emotionally approachable piece. Beginning from a painter’s point-of-view he imbues photography with both documentary and artistic meaning. The beliefs of the ability of photography to document reality are being questioned by the artist. Also Torracchi’s refusal to indulge in the excesses of mass media imagery is achieved by de-contextualization. In this epoch of unceasing changes and transformations at a global level his photographs reflect a sense of impermanence. The artist plays with contemporary questions and perceptual habits. He chooses to emphasize subjects concerned with appropriation, authorship, hybridity and trans-disciplinary pollination. Torracchi poses concomitant questions regarding the fascination an image exerts. The artist explores these issues through the cancellation of meanings in conjunction with his search for a pure and sensitive truth.

Claudio Mello

May-June 2006