"AMAI" (“I Loved”) is a kind of visual diary where our gaze does not want to be nostalgic but more intimate. We present some recent and some less recent works, all united by a common thread: the persistence or absence of matter over the changing form. How we have dealt with this persistence is the feeling that remains with us, the memory of a kiss, of a chair, of a couch without the dog.

The persistence but also the difficult fate of a copy in adhering to its original form, the struggle to adjust all the pieces, the vain attempt to stop time by freezing the scene.

 Finally, our chairs in the studio during the lockdown. It happened that one day we all stopped and took refuge within our walls. We photographed our clothes just as they were laid out a minute before taking a shower. Our clothes, those personal items, deprived of our freedom.

The exhibition at the Nero design Gallery represents a return to Arezzo, a place dear to us, and encompasses the everyday honesty we found in the poetry of Umberto Saba


Amai

Amai trite parole che non uno
osava. M'incantò la rima fiore
amore,
la più antica, difficile del mondo

Amai la verità che giace al fondo,
quasi un sogno obliato, che il dolore
riscopre amica. Con paura il cuore
le si accosta, che più non l'abbandona...

I Loved

I loved the worn words that no one else
dared use. I was enchanted by the rhyme June
moon,
the oldest and most stubborn in the world.

I loved the truth that lies in the depths,
almost a forgotten dream, that pain
rediscovers as a friend. With dread the heart
approaches it and never after lets it go...

For us, poetry is as close to art as we can imagine, something personal and intimate that becomes a feeling. Something that is felt but can't be completely explained. The place where white is not absence, where silence is to say something.

Fratelli Calgaro

 

BIO _ Graduating in Philosophy with a thesis on Photography in the Aesthetics of Walter Benjamin at the Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Giuseppe Calgaro worked as an advertising photographer for lifestyle magazines and fashion and clothing brands. He founded as an artist in 2003 the Calgaro Brothers with which he has exhibited in several group and solo shows in Italy and abroad. At the heart of the Calgaro Brothers' photographic images is a research that pushes photography towards visual oxymorons, always starting from the reality of places and people. He teaches photography at the Accademia Aldo Galli in Como, alternating his artistic research with photographic reportages in Italy and abroad.

ph: Jacopo Bille