Paolo Capelletti
The lazy gaze of things
One of the most obvious measures to observe the changing of history are objects, things. Things settle in the world of those who have produced, bought, used, consumed, abandoned and forgotten them. They live this life of theirs, each with its own story but all with similar laziness. It is the laziness of time that flows on them, a time suffered by the things that ultimately tells us about the time we undergo, that we are entitled to, that we allow to come upon us and take us away.
If we talk about time, we always are already talking about photography. These shots come from that time crystal in which things seem stationary, immobile, yet they are changing, one moment after another. It would be shortsighted to judge this change as a simple decay: it must be remembered that death has no effect on things. In things laid there and abandoned, in this evident disorder, in this entropic accumulation of small catastrophes, things are nevertheless indifferent to their fate. Rather, it is we who see it. And it is we who, accustomed to passing our eyes on these things without noticing them, once we have seen their fate, we can no longer ignore it. It will end up persecuting us because, in the end, going to meet their destiny lazily, in silence, is the way things have to bang in our face death, ours.
Time and death. If it's not this, photography, then what else? Watching things alight next to each other, one on top of the other, one inside the other is what animates these shots by Federico Pacini. These glances that, when distracted, suddenly focus and concentrate us on a detail, on an apparition, on an unlikely yet realized coexistence of objects and environments. And without effort, with the indifference and laziness with which men do things, marry them, believe them to be new forever. And when they see them again, as happens in these shots, they discover that things return their gaze and denounce their indifference, their laziness, their death.
The real power of these photographs, after all, lies not so much in the mortality they make visible but rather in demonstrating that there is no ethical judgment in this gaze that things give back to us: they simply are there, there they concern us, with an attitude neither good nor bad but insuperably true: the attitude that belongs to the most intimate style of things produced by men, kitsch. Kitsch is the language that the things that men create and then forget always speak: the language of improbable and ugly combinations, the language of irreconcilable differences and disorder, the language of what does not want (and cannot) be better or worse but that can (and therefore wants to) only be true.
This awareness, this way in which things look at us, our eyes mature long before our words and our thoughts. Likewise, these photographs will always arrive in advance on each line that we would like to dedicate to them. The last piece of advice, then, is to let them look at us and open their world, generate it within our gaze, let us see the style of things that see us.
Montichiari, January 23, 2022
Stile, 2022 (89books)