Mario Carrieri. Amata bellezza. Flowers and Visions: Photographs

A key, very reserved gure in the world of Italian photography, Mario Carrieri gathers the results of years of work in the cycle of images in this exhibition.
In his solitary photographic research on “Flowers andVisions,”in what might be erroneously described as “still lifes,” he sets out to interpret the tragic character of human existence, presenting on his own imaginary visual stage a “Whole” that is dramatically visionary and pantheistic, almost theatrical, as if suspended on
the thread of a light so remote as to seem to be frozen outside of time.
In his photographs, the actors in this drama are in fact simply owers and their in nite, perishable beauty. Flowers and beauty that ow in the delirious river of a universal nothingness, shattered by their own suffering. The exhibition includes very large works shown in public for the rst time, in a big space of the Milan Triennale, offering viewers a key of interpretation of extreme technical prowess and intensity.

“With the force of innocence and without fear of the dark, I have photographed an endless dawn, born of a nest of nameless owers, and I have sprinkled my gladioli in tears of winged pistils, changing them into tadpole-spermatozoa ready to sacri ce themselves to fertilize a Milky Way of hope.”

Mario Carrieri

Mario Carrieri, universal and particular

When I began to talk with Mario Carrieri about the possibility of producing this exhibition, his reaction was blunt: for your sake, I hope it doesn’t happen.
This will come as no surprise to those who know him.
What is surprising is that if you are reading these words, it means the show has become a reality.
His natural reluctance, his extreme reserve, have led him to conduct research in the secrecy of his studio for 40 years, research that may be impossible, but has allowed him to achieve results of such quality that I deem it necessary to make them known.This is also a duty towards Mario Carrieri himself, towards his incessant pursuit of beauty by means of the quality of his action.
To use his words, the beauty in his photographs cannot be described; we can only observe, in the perfection
of the technical gesture that underlines that moment in which – since it cannot be realized – beauty becomes the tragedy of a destination never reached.
We have had to perform a sort of maieutic exercise to tug out of his studio a trove of works – many thousands – and make them exist in a small number in the light of day, wresting the universe of Mario Carrieri from its “primordial soup” and catapulting it into our world to allow everyone to enjoy it, though providing
it with a golden cradle, offered by the Milan Triennale and the Museum of Contemporary Photography.
The photographs, owers and visions, are vox media of the universe the artist probes, investigates and depicts in his painstaking work that would be a daily practice were it not for the invitations to travel the world to apply his mastery – in this case renowned – to capture on lm the most beautiful works of architecture, the nest interiors by contemporary architects and designers.
The in nitely small and the in nitely large coexist in his photographs, almost as if he had found a way
to condense, in a single image, the extraordinary visions we all remember from Powers of Ten by the Eameses. Passages in the Universe through which everything can be seen, everything can be imagined, and everything
is alive, vibrant, pulsating, to the point of making these owers into a paradigm of living life, as far away
as possible from the still life, as Carrieri emphasizes, because in every shot there are thousands of other photographs and years of work, a vision and a passion. At the same time, however, we can count, one by one, the very slender and almost invisible laments hidden in the secret womb of the owers.
Concrete and abstract, the Universe of Mario Carrieri allows each of us to re ect our own image inside it,
to nd our own dimension, our own universal vision.
For this reason, today – having reached the far from easy goal of being able to show the public his works
in the prestigious setting of the Triennale – as a friend and admirer more than as a curator, it is my hope that Mario Carrieri will never be able to reach his beloved beauty, so he will be able to continue to seek it, again and always, through the photographs he will offer us in the years to come.

Alessandro Colombo 

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