Antonio Colombo presents for LITTLE CIRCUS, the gallery’s special project space, the solo show by Sergio Calatroni entitled Naples - Tokyo 7x7. 14 black and white photographs. Stigmata of two cities by the sea. Inkjet prints on P.P.F25 paper, 18x13 cm, in limited editions of 28 signed and numbered copies.

A series of platinum prints on paper, format 33x40 cm, made by hand by Sergio Devecchi, forms a printed folder in a limited edition fo 14 numbered and signed copies. Two original poems by Luigi Cerantola, written in calligraphy on Japanese paper, on Naples and Tokyo, in the format 21x29.7 cm, accompany the show. They are signed and numbered and included in the folders.

• Looking around
The black and white photographs of Kanemura Osama, from Stop Tokyo, 1996, Keihin Machine Soul, 1996, of Catherine Wagner, Fossils, 1996, of John Gossage, Land, 1994, of Timothy O’Sullivan, Ruins of the Pueblo San Juan, New Mexico, 1874, and more… Lots of photographs. Many, a great many images. A long list, impossible to make. Then the anonymous works, the pioneers of photography. Interminable enumeration.
All the Icaruses who burned negatives upon negatives to capture an image.
One good one, just one that counts. That makes an imprint on collective memory. Makes history.
Photography is a heroic art. You have to do battle, physically and mentally, with everything you encounter. Encounter and revelation. The instant. Nothing.
This is what I like about this form of meditation. It is not a job. It couldn’t be. Photography is just the first leg of the journey toward the unknown. Starting point and end.
Firmament.

• Why Naples and Tokyo
Two cities by the sea. Shipwrecked. Ruins of an always inapplicable method, where the violence of desires remains intact, and even immediately regenerates, and images like thoughts are floating shadows that penetrate existence like a needle.
Two places where force is concentrated in diversity, not in unity, and the pure image is the distilled essence of the unfulfilled.

• The things of the world. A suspended instant
In this world things appear all together, simultaneously.
They are available and have different intensities. They have light and dark form. They possess intimacy and force of attraction. They are projections of our mind.
They are always insufficient and absent. They lack explanation. They vanish just as they appear. They are not.

• On clarity
Splendor. Celestial essence. Light. Extraordinary clarity. A force that disrupts the sense of familiar things. Absence of absolute darkness. Pure energy in the depths of every image that reveals something beyond the visible and the comprehensible. Clarity, the evidence of the invisible absolute.