«Sequences»

by Mario Pepe

Belsole is one of those artists who are interested in a critical and structural approach to aesthetic research by using  criteria of lecture and judgement aimed to bind together art and psychological perception. He makes visible, through the photographic instrument, phenomena that escape ocular perception, which is usually occupied to integrate the optical image with our preconceived experience.

His photograph is a “sample” from reality, an objective document of the existence of the human being, a proof of the real  happenings in their infinite variations.  Photos refer to a kind of people absolutely ordinary, daily, whose behaviour overlaps that of  those who live in large cities, a habitat in continuous transformation which induces ritualised pathways.      
The artist reports the futility of the individual event among the restless motion of the crowd  with the scientific attitude of an anthropologist who is observing the behaviour of a primitive tribe. 

His language is very close to that of cinema where the overall significance comes from the sequence of images rather than from the single one. The sequence has no end. It reveals human events that we should account for, as they have penetrated into our individual consciousness.

Masters of  urban landscape photography have been Walker Evans, with his clean formal architectures; the Bechers with their cataloguing of industrial buildings; Andreas  Gursky whose photographs have been quoted  as much as paintings; Gabriele Basilico with his view of  places as minimal structures where normality and banality are confined. Belsole fills his urban stage, usually photographed  without people, with a moving crowd observed under an amplifying lens which dismantles the space to report the event anonymously. Perspective is abolished as in Rosso Fiorentino paintings which reflect the crisis of Renaissance equilibrium. The flat images underline a one-dimensional and oppressive ambient.

With the images of Berlin or Helsinky as well as those of New York showed in a preceding exhibition, the artist depicts people walking through hindrances such as tubes, barriers or glasses, which prevent a clean perception and underline the limits of their lives. The smiling faces of advertisements, images into the image, placed side by side with those of real people, split
the casualty further by influencing their behaviour and marring the mechanisms of the tale.

The cities in the background, undifferentiated containers of a human fauna who has lost her roots, are not recognizable but for some detail. Delocalisation of urban events refers to Gursky’s photographs of  town suburbs taken far from their identificative points. Only the title makes the difference. Belsole’s photographs do not need suburbs to transfer the sense of “non-place”. They report the identity loss even of  those urban tissues most qualified as the “down towns”, where people go for walking and  shopping, which yield to the same anonymity and behavioural homologation.