The Gold of Time, Mario Cresci's Photos on Show in Los Angeles

Italian photography contemporary art stops in Los Angeles. The Italian Institute of Culture hosts the exhibition 'Mario Cresci. 'The Gold of Time', a solo exhibition by the 83-year-old iconoclast of the lens. The black and white shots exhibited in the venue of Westwood are born from Cresci's artistic residency at the Central Institute for Cataloguing and Documentation of Rome, body of the Ministry of Culture, which preserves over eight millions of phototypes, from the origins of this visual art up to Today. As part of a program that invites great authors contemporaries to dialogue with the historical collections, Cresci is is concentrated on two nuclei of the Roman archive: the portraits of the beautiful fin de siècle world signed by Mario Nunes Vais and a series of images documenting a collection of Greco-Roman statues. As curator Francesca Fabiani explains, "through HIS questioning look, these subjects become the point of departure for a series of visual experiments, obtained reworking, isolating and reiterating details of the images original, always respecting the author who conceived them". "Reality is not what we see, but rather what we we feel as time passes. This feeling then changes with the frequency and intensity of our experiences, together with the way to see and think about the world", reflects the artist. Grow belongs to a niche of conceptual artists and Italian nonconformists who in the Sixties took up the camera as an investigative tool, too politics. After the recent international debut in a gallery of London, some of his works arrive in the capital of cinema. "It's not just about welcoming a great master of the Italian photography, but to propose a reflection on time, on memory and the transformative power of the gaze artistic. Cresci plays with photographs of the past to reveal new meanings, demonstrating how the archive is not not only conservation, but also a field of invention. The Italian tradition becomes contemporary code. A message powerful, in a city that has made images its language and identity", declared the director of the Italian Institute of Culture, Emanuele Amendola, inaugurating the exhibition last night.