Empty Space

“Her name burns and pierces, shrouded in blood-red. She is a shadowy figure dissolving into a slumbering, desolate landscape. Slowly, her illuminated form, vanishes. Her effigy fades out. She dissipates, her image breaks up into tiny flecks of light, embracing the shining magic of the dark night. Her absence is transmuted into a slender elegant vision which shimmers and glows. The enchantment of the night has absorbed the silences of her vanished presence, only a glimmer remains witnessing this hallucinatory vision.

This is the story of a woman who only exists in front of an observer. When nobody is looking she begins to disappear.“

Every photograph is something of a mystery - born of a dream or a nightmare, a ride to unreal places or otherworldliness - as if they arose from the depths of our unconscious where people struggle in darkness for their own identity.

The images create fragments of memory, dream sequences distorted, combining real memories and suggestions made by others. Strange houses, haunted presences, monsters, animal heads, chimeras, emotions. Fragments of a dream where we wander, and the familiar and well known become unrelated, foreign and threatening. As in hallucinations, coherence and proportion are fleeting.

The juxtaposition between the present moment and a surreal scenario disrupt reality from within. The series rejects the rational, unyielding, detachment of the gaze.

Addicted to the ephemeral, Nicoletta Cerasomma prefers intimate concepts with refined visual identity. She invites the viewer to a meditation on the loneliness of being human and the amazing brilliance of being found. The different aspects of existence, including the dark and the mysterious, are closely melded. Darkness is vital in her world and part of her essence, in which everything is turned around by the dualism of light and dark that dominates our lives.  

Aesthetic embellishment and extravagance permeate the series. This is a way to give continuity to the mythology of surreal worlds and characters, to evoke stories that take you out of the mundane and plunge you into a world full of wonders.

The palette is dark with blacks, greys, earthtones, as well as poppy red and gold. Colours that recall ash, blood and harsh light. Bright contours contrast with these shades and are used to arouse the viewer’s imagination. The gold leaf and paint represent the impermanence of the vulnerability of trauma, transforming into hope. The colour red is used to signify life, blood and violence, while black emphasises the onirical, alienation, melancholy and nostalgia for what is forever lost. The absence of colour, the unreality. Our scars are derived of experiences profoundly marked by incertitude and chaos. Gold honours our wounds. They make us who we are today. Erasing them would hide who we really are to ourselves and others. This multi-layered technique faces the trauma experienced personally by the photographer and the expectation of a better future.

The photographer uses the images as a way of reshaping her personal history and to further develop her sense of consciousness. She transforms the reality and creates something personal through metaphor and imagery that suggest the failure to control the forces that seem to dictate our lives, particularly those of women. The aim is to highlight and then reduce gender bias in social relationships and expectations, despite our impotence in the face of that dominant power. But we are not alone. The deeper we go into the profundity of the darkness, the more light we can see. It means that there is beauty in the bright moments and also in the darker ones. In this way, through her art she fights against her past and purges her inner demons.

In this series every diptych expresses its own concept. Each diptych tells a story that unfolds, reinforced by the duplicity, between the portrayed character and different worlds, different but intrinsically connected. Every image is designed to be printed separately but intrinsically linked to the complementary image.

The viewer is invited to find his magic place in suggestive landscapes, shadowy dwellings or hideaways. Here everything seems to be fused with our own backgrounds and experience and inner journey. Unable to resist, we find ourselves part of this illusion.

Credits: