Appears

Multidisciplinary artist, Luciano Rigolini explores the nature of the image photographic, namely its ambiguity in its relationship to reality. His works, which take multiple forms, notably through the film support, question the status of the image and its process of creation. For several years, Rigolini has stopped take pictures, preferring to get those from anonymous photographers. approach is conceptual: the act of appropriation and reworking on anonymous documents without value give them another value. Juxtaposed for create a personal narrative, and therefore an artistic point of view, photographs then reveal an original creative approach. The references to 20th century avant-gardes, notably the Bauhaus and New Objectivity, are not far away; they place Rigolini's productions in a dimension both conceptual and poetic. The manipulations he makes the images emphasize their pictorial nature: each scratch, mark and grain of dust, as well as the different color tones affirm their materiality. Since always, and this from the first experiments carried out by the pioneers – from Hippolyte Bayard to Nicéphore Niépce, including Henry Fox Talbot – photography is related to technology. Today, the arrival of AI-generated images shakes up the situation and questions the quality of the artist and the idea of creation. This exploratory field of AI particularly interests Rigolini in offering other possibilities to explore photography, its truth and its nature. Entitled Apparere ("to appear" in Latin), this work presents a visual corpus generated using intelligence algorithms artificial. The images collected here are the result of very detailed indications that the artist himself gave to an AI software. The dialogue that he establishes with the machine blurs a little more the border between the photographic nature and pictorial of the works he produces. This set evokes both the experiments formal avant-gardes and the aesthetics of photographic abstraction. The eye tries to identify a shape, to recognize a landscape, to find an allusion to the history of art. But here the artist unequivocally attests that the photographic image is always and only a simulacrum of reality. It is then up to the viewer to appreciate the dreamlike journey.