Neroblu Blackblue

Costanza  Ferrini

Nero Blu Black blue, 2020, 1000×7000 mm

writing with digital photographs

PROCEEDINGS AND SYNOPSIS

Historica:March confinement.

I proceed to print two large engravings in black and blue on rough white canvas and I I hang them in front of the French window.

From the immobility of the body comes the exercise of daily observation of the courtyard, the street and the building in front, its balconies, and I participate in life, first putting my eye to the canvas then the photographic one to the tablet. A sort of symbiosis of the body between the canvas and the landscape beyond it. One shot a day.

I apply, from within the private space, the device of photo-graphics, taken in public spaces in New York and Berlin.

The photo-graphic notes are photographs of marginal parts, details of landscapes viewed through grates, roadworks nets, shading, reflections of light on smooth or porous surfaces or against the light… And more photographs to fix in the memory architectural details especially of the relationship between external and internal space, thresholds, stairs, windows, crossings, bridges… .Or textures impressed in the concrete, asphalt shapes, layers of plaster and peeling of walls and their successive repairs, stains..or traces left in the use of public spaces by the movement of bodies.

Each photo-graph is therefore a sign.

Their assemblage constitutes a kind of handwriting, writing that in the sedimentation is implemented through the device in other materials and techniques, even opaque.

In the case of confinement, the opposite process took place. Through a texture printed by the body, spaces and lights are explored that cannot be traversed by it, and, starting from immobility participates in the life of the street and its  emptiness, the presence and absence of people outside or inside the courtyard. As the days go by, I realise that the engravings have become, like the rarefied layer of the palimpsest of a parchment through which the space can be read.

The material transparency of the focus, chosen every day, in the shades of black and blue of the engravings, varies or is repeated depending on my mood.

It is the light that supports the ligatures, the notations, recording the days in a phrasing, a succession of rhythms and signs, sonorous caesuras, colourings, accents and pauses.

This is why Neroblu is not a collage.

At the act of ‘writing’, the light comes from behind the glass.

At the act of reading, the light backlights the ‘written’ page on the screen of the computer.