All photos, 'Untitled', 2007, by Giacomo Brunelli.
At first glance Giacomo Brunelli's series of black and white silver gelatin photographs point toward a single central subject - the life of animals and their everyday actions. But this is no ordinary, Hallmark card-style rebus of familiar fauna linking animals expressions to our own. Here we see animals carrying on their own activities - space-sensitive cats running away, hens walking without concern for human pathways, horses rising instead of being ridden. It's less certain to know what the caption of these images could be - there is an essential blankness and enigmatic openness to all the images, even the ones where the subject is returning the viewer's gaze with a kind of defiance
What appears to us to be contemplative, moody, forlorn, etc, is also, the very blankness of what we're looking at, a field for us to consider our own ways of constructing portraiture. These images encourage us to discard predictable moral and ethical projections, and makes us aware of how much these projections depend on setting, mood, lighting, and the artist's manipulation of all these elements. Brunelli knows how to work these elements to evoke a range of emotions, all of which leave the viewer with a haunting sense of possibility, of looking differently at the everyday.
To see more of Brunelli's works, click here and visit the artist's own site, giacomobrunelli.com.
Lupe Nunez Fernanez
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