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Synopsis: ‘The Accidental Theorist’

There is an absence of life, a paucity of purpose, and a sense of the uncanny that permeates the silence of these photographs, whose scenes, like a black hole, seem to have consumed all traces and signs of life. The sun has been usurped, in its absence, by a mysterious source of lighting, that pushes back the blackness of the night and we are obliged to fill in the absences that it relentlessly exposes. All that represents the ambience of a holiday beach is missing. The pervasive tranquillity is paradoxical, not calming but disturbing, discordant, incongruous, the viewer longs for the signs and symptoms of life to pump up the visual volume and superimpose the social identity of this place.
Given the paucity of clues offered, our curiosity is inevitably aroused and the detective in us begins to prowl around these scenes. Which country are we being shown here, which season could it be, spring, summer or autumn? What time of night is this? We might reasonably guess the early hours of the morning, so why the copious floodlighting? Is this a redundant film set awaiting the actors’ return, or perhaps an inanimate model in the mode of the miniature mise en scene landscapes of the American artist Michael Ashkin? The possibilities proliferate but there are always more questions than answers, always more assumed reasons than reality could hold down.
This is the flip side of Massimo Vitali’s photographs of North Italian beaches which teem with life and action where our gaze becomes satiated by detail, our eyes and our minds held firmly within the frame, here in these images our mind begins to wander beyond the frame. In an attempt to reinforce the rickety ontology of this work we are tempted to rove beyond the confines of the frame, under the red-hot glare of analysis the frame begins to melt, imagination breaks through its thwarted threshold, the party’s over and we want to find out where the revellers have gone, denied access to the social raison d’ettre of this scene we inhabit it with our own imagined populations and their narratives.
The solid blackness in these images has an air of the supernatural reinforcing that intangible yet somehow persistent presence of the uncanny – an abyss whose threshold teeters on the edge of credibility, where the indexicality of the image can only be tentatively maintained by the viewers suspension of disbelief.
The dark skies seem to offer a conduit to that whelming black void of interstellar space that signals things eternal – time is not just frozen here but eternity-touched. These scenes take on their own existence whose stillness and silence can only be suggested, a suggestion decisive enough to strongly signify a gnawing absence, an overwhelming sense of the melancholic. The sober and solemn reflections that haunt us after the euphoria of the party has passed and worn off, as entropy picks at its remains, as conversations fade into memories that bridge the void, all imbue the mood of this work.”

'The Accidental Theorist'

2005
C-Type print
66x83cm

'The Accidental Theorist'

2005
C-Type print
98x127cm

'The Accidental Theorist'

2005
C-Type print
66x83cm

'The Accidental Theorist'

2007
C-type print
98x127cm

The Accidental Theorist

2006
C-type print
98x127cm

The Accidental Theorist

2006
C-type print
98x127cm

The Accidental Theorist

2006
C-type print
98x127cm

Untitled, from the series Hidden

2005
C-type print
40x50cm

Untitled, from the series Hidden

2005
C-type print
40x50cm

Untitled, from the series Hidden

2005
C-type print
40x50cm

Untitled, from the series Hidden

2005
C-type print
40x50cm

Untitled, from the series The Rehearsal of Space

2006
C-type print
98x127cm

Untitled, from the series The Rehearsal of Space

2006
C-type print
98x127cm

Untitled, from the series When Light Cast No Shadow

2008
Photography, C-type Print
98x254cm

Untitled, from the series When Light Cast No Shadow

2008
Photography, C-type Print
98x254cm

Untitled, from the series When Light Cast No Shadow

2008
Photography, C-type Print
98x254cm

Untitled, from the series When Light Cast No Shadow

2008
Photography, C-type Print
98x127cm

Untitled, from the series When Light Cast No Shadow

2008
Photography, C-type Print
98x127cm