Présentation de l'artiste

Paolo Bonfiglio

I live in Milan, where I was born in 1961. I studied business administration and always worked for international consultancy firms. Photography always played a parallel and essential role, deployed through passion, dedication and fun. Throughout the years I attended some workshops, including a one-week experience with Andreas Bitesnich about nude.

The backbone of my works consists of two elements. Firstly, the combination between the search for different themes and languages and the focus on the connection between reality and its features, particularly for those apparently concealed but revealing, regardless of subject: a person, an object, a scene. Secondly, the attempt to connect to facts and tangible issues, also in those photographs which are seemingly far from sheer reality. Everything is thought to preserve the real essence of photography and fulfil its nature: capturing something which was there - like all of us.

In addition to photography, I am a passionate writer.

Artist statement

Surfacex - A work that explores walls’ multiple meanings and appearances. Everything is transformed from a simple physical boundary into real perceptive thresholds. This project exalts the materiality and depth of details, underlining how even the most common of surfaces can be transformed into an emotional and symbolic landscape. Thus, moving between aesthetics and introspection, between investigation and abstraction. Walls as shelter, barrier, palimpsest of signs and memories, place of cultural and social stratification. Not just an obstacle or border, but a living surface, permeable to time and human gestures: a blank sheet transformed into an expressive space for anonymous voices, spontaneous forms and details capable of evoking unexpected sensations. Like the resonances between interior time and the traces left on matter.

This is made even more explicit in the book (prefaced by Gigliola Foschi), where 33 photographs are grouped into five sections interspersed with short texts from Marcel Proust’s Recherche. Literary references do not act as simple accompaniment but create a game of references that leads the viewer to question the very genesis of the photographic gaze and its power to extract meaning from what appears involuntary in the material world around us steeped in hidden meanings.

This idea resonates with the aim of revealing, through surfaces, hidden stories and feelings, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary.