Massimo Leardini have used Nordmarka in Oslo as a source of inspiration and
research in his work for many years. In “Elv”, he uses the river and its banks
as the setting for his latest work. The images combine fragments of bodies and
landscapes of a bucolic nature. But the bucolic does not appear here as a landscape
tradition but as a diffuse context.
The map that Leardini unfolds is not built, but behaves like a puzzle in the imagination
of the viewer, who mentally puts his pieces together and draws the lines
of the banks of this river and its surroundings.
The photographs were taken between 2014 and 2019, always during the summer
period, when the Scandinavian light prolongs the shadows due to the obliqueness
with which the sun reaches this part of the world in an almost tangent way.
This causes the light to draw the silhouettes of your subjects on the background
with a high but delicate contrast.
Massimo works with a fixed lens and without a tripod, the closeness or distance
of his images are the result of the movement of his own body. It crosses the landscape and creates different approaches to what it frames, weaving a relationship
with the surrounding environment.
The surprise of the forms –both the skin and the bark– arises from the fascination
of looking strangely. This modus operandi has crossed the history of photography
thanks to pioneering works such as that of Edward Weston, his gaze
has permeated subsequent generations displacing the importance of the subject
/ object and focusing on how to approach what is photographed. How we always
look above what we look at.
To the question of how a naked body looks, Leardini gives an answer using delicacy.
A delicacy that looks through the sculptural tradition of his native Italy and
from which we recognize the elegance of his return.
–
Book published by Stanley/Barker Books – Nov. 2020
