Stefano Nicolini's photography breaks one of the principles of contemporary photography by emphasizing the roles fulfilled by beauty and harmony, values which contemporary photography itself has denied. His photographs demand a new consideration for the various photographic genres such as landscape photography, wildlife photography, and reportage since the act of doing art requires a continuous conceptual and aesthetic entanglement which has pushed these genres into the background. The strong emotive impact of Nicolini's photographs leaves the observer overwhelmed by a bright, devastating and, at the same time, multiform beauty. Moreover, one remains struck by the enlivening values and sensations which accompany their essence: purity, greatness, wonder, primeval, mystery, intimacy, belonging, tragedy, danger, inferiority, frailty.
Therefore, Nicolini proposes beauty also as a form of expression of the most bitter realities. And this beauty demands to start speaking again with art, and with photography in particular, as it always had, up to half a century ago. No longer an untouchable “pariah”, but a protagonist that can go back to shining on man's thrilling journey, which is existential even before being artistic.
Nowadays, in an always more violent and vulgar society, the function carried out by representations of grace and harmony can be both functional and moderating. But going beyond such function, Nicolini's photographs give rise to a decisive and uncomfortable question: isn't there in art, and therefore in the photography identified as contemporary (as if that excluded from such definition weren't so) an overestimation and misuse of the conceptual element and of the capability to trigger reflection?
Nicolini's photography is characterized by plasticity, a brilliant use of chromatisms, expressive force, clarity of the light (never supported by flash devices nor floodlights), research for details.
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