Robert Polidori Devotion Abandoned
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ROBERT POLIDORI DEVOTION ABANDONED Between 2017 and 2018, Robert Polidori spent long periods of time in Naples photographing the city’s abandoned churches to explore the gradual decline of religious fervour, a reoccurring characteristic of modernity throughout the entire Western world and a cultural transformation which entails many psychological effects. Without ever altering the scenes before his eyes, Polidori manages to capture the emotional aspects of these sites in his shots while leaving their memory intact. Through his lens, the deterioration is sublimated and becomes a metaphor of a state of being. His large-scale pictorial, colour photographs lead the viewer into a suspended dimension where stories overlap one another and are revealed through layers of material displaying the design of time’s slow passage which give life to “spontaneous paintings” that artist manages to capture in an eternal moment. For Polidori, abandoned churches are “places of being”, as are the ruins of Oplontis, Pompeii and the Phlegraean Fields for they allow visitors to perceive the existence of a time, which is not the historical, measurable period that restoration works attempt to resuscitate. Rather this is a lost time, far from our world, the traces of which each of us carry deep within ourselves. The exhibit will be open to the public until 30 January, 2019. Biography Robert Polidori was born in Montreal in 1951 and has lived in California since 2015. He began his career in New York in avant-garde film making assisting Jonas Mekas in the Anthology Film Archives, an experience which had a profound impact on his approach to photography. When he lived in Paris in the early 1980s, he began documenting the restoration of Versailles and has continued to photograph the ongoing transformations of the site for over 30 years. He has developed photographic projects in Havana, Chernobyl and documented the flooding in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and exhibited the resulting photographs at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Polidori has exhibited in public and private venues all over the world, has received numerous awards and recognition and his works are in the collections of the most important international museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Musée d'art contemporain in Montréal, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. In his most recent projects, he has focused his attention on urban growth by photographing urban aggregates with very complex structures in continuous architectural and demographic expansion including Mumbai, Rio de Janeiro and Amman. In 1997, he won the World Press Photo Award. Studio Trisorio • Riviera di Chiaia, 215 • Tel. +39 081 414306 • [email protected] • www.studiotrisorio.com .