Giasco Bertoli is a photographer and artist, he transforms the raw and simple beauty of an everyday mythology into something classic, magical or perhaps even sophisticated. A vision of the ordinary that we sometimes no longer see. When we met, he gave me this excerpt from Oscar Wilde’s text: “When I look at the landscape, I cannot help but see all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, because otherwise we would have no art”. His work has been questioning our relationship with reality, landscape, memory and imagination for years. He explores how these elements transform our perception of the everyday and the ordinary, inviting us to be surprised by what we thought we knew. Giasco Bertoli amazes and inspires us with his long-term explorations and his wanderings through the landscape. At the bend of a path, a gate or a tree, he captures the inevitable passage of time, the feeling of forgetting and abandonment, like a sequence shot capturing the trace of the places crossed.
What remains is the obsession with existence, the recurrence of what was, the absence of human presence, a constant that is also found in the series of abandoned tennis courts that he has been tirelessly exploring for over 25 years. His gaze lingers on the traces of the profound interaction between man and his constructions that have become the symbols of our collective memory.
Like the menhirs of Brittany, these ancient stones, alone, lost at the bend of a path become under his lens the vectors of a quest, without denying the happiness that can inspire the romance of encounter and discovery. The menhirs, by their imposing stature, recall both a link with our ancestors and an aspiration towards something greater, spiritual, evoking transcendence. Giasco Bertoli reinterprets these elements in a poetic reflection on landscape and human identity. Confronting the ancient and the contemporary, the spiritual and the material, and fascinated by the ‘beauty of indifference’, he pushes us to question the stories we create and the parallel realities we inhabit. His work becomes an invitation to explore them, to meditate on them.
— Christoph Wiesner
The exhibition is accompanied by issue 22 of the journal Roses Tatouées, kindly supported by delpire & co. It contains a selection of 18 photographs. This journal, published since 2002, has welcomed many contributing artists, it is the living memory of a form of endless artistic project.
