Paolo Picozza, photo by Max Tomasinelli

Francesca Antonini Arte Contemporanea is pleased to present ‘Dans l’eau sale’, a project by Max Tomasinelli, photographer and artist based in Turin (1971).

Tomasinelli’s research focuses on the photographic practices related to portraiture, trying to capture, in an intimate and delicate way, the personality of internationally known artists.

The gallery hosts a photographic project that the artist has been developing for more than ten years, elaborating an anthropological and social experiment carrying an abundance of memories and references. On display a selection of more than thirty portraits that cancel the distance between images and viewers: transcending their personal dimension, artists are not captured in their daily routine, but rather in the middle of iconic and symbolic gestures. Although they may feel either popular or humble, discredited or valued, each image raises the column of a contemporary Pantheon, secular as well as sacred, where Humanism entirely resides in the sense of homo faber. And yet, instead of their works, portrayed artists challenge contingency and show themselves to be still, posing, ready to be shot in moments of rest or interior, invisible torment.

On this occasion, willing to go on expanding the project, Max Tomasinelli has shot a new group of portraits of the artists of Francesca Antonini gallery, displayed here for the first time.