"Lights (and shades) of the city"

With "lights (and shadows) of the city," Alessandro Cidda presents part of a series of his famous production, "Fenomeni".

Fenomeni is a series of photos dedicated to characters from the movies and comics of the last 50 years, from Morpheus to Crow, from Batman to Silver Surfer.

Works that depict action figures and model vintage find in markets around the world, photographed by the fashion Cidda baroque, proof that art is everyday, art is always and forever.

In this selection of photographs is the predominant desire of the artist to ask the visitor to understand that light and shade coexist in all of us although it will deny, we are made of good and evil, but to remain children as the Bible also says, opens the gates of happiness.

The best way to combat the shadow play. With the light of the knowledge conveyed by the images. Atavistic human attitude, graffiti Neolithic onwards.

In the exhibition "Lights (and shades) of the City" on display at the Fashion Cafe from November 4 to December 30, is an obvious choice of artist to pay homage to Baroque art and its masters, but above., The cartoons and adolescent soul of everyone.

Baroque portraiture in art history, of course today would not make sense to play these masterpieces would not be art if it were not innovative. So the metaphors of the relationship between light and shadow - so close to Caravaggio who made the complaint subtle, encrypted, on pain of decapitation some - back in the characters of our time, crossed by two "phenomena" inevitable and ubiquitous: television and film.

The skill with which Cidda reproduces the colors of the Baroque and makes ironic metaphor in the photographs that make up "lights (and shadows) of the City" bringing the mind to the protagonists of our daily life, the rightful place among the best photographers Pop Italian.

Francesco Cascino

Contemporary Art Consultant

CineciGioia

There is a place in Rome, inside Cinecittà, among the enormous movie studios, where sculptures and movie sets have been produced for four generations. This project is a homage to an ever more rare work of excellence. It is homage to Italian creativity and artisanship, which fills us with often unconscious emotions through the charm of its amazing achievements. These photographs are testimony of a place where every corner is filled with surprises and history. Through two distinct visual levels, they deliver to us the enjoyably comfortable feelings that only the hand of the artisan can create. They are images of objects and scuptures that in other places and context have complemented the stories and emotions we all live through the silver screen.

Introduction by Gianluca Marziani for the exhibition entitled Sign City, at the Monocromo Art Gallery in Rome 5th-28th of April 2007

Testo critico, a cura di Gianluca Marziani, del catalogo Fenomeni editato in occasione della mostra personale presso Monocromo Art Gallery di Roma 23 novembre 2006 – 27 gennaio 2007


RED VISION
Gianluca Marziani

Alessandro Cidda created three new artworks which keep the right tuning with the last “Fenomeni Gallery 1” cycle. They are three big size works: a Batman shot from behind, the Statue of Liberty shot from the bottom, the Twin Tower shot in the front. To one side here is a New York as a symbol of our uneasiness, to the other side Batman who becomes an ideal collective look, the archetype of the global rescue in order to (toward) an horizon of an aesthetic revival.

FENOMENI
Gianluca Marziani

Alessandro Cidda catapults us in the plastic world of his Fenomeni made in reduced scale; Everything was born from a collector’s passion which become fetishism for puppets and toys to chase and flush out, which are added to the group already made, finding a refined and precious version, sometimes playing with the less rigorous and yet brighter as a sculptural figure.

In this first gallery we can see a formation of characters which in the past have founded film, sometimes TV serial, other times many representations with various expressions. They are invented figures wanting to resemble to daily reality, being part of it with their rules between human and the very special “super” habits.

His army of microbodies is exposed in a equipped studio; black background (except rare occasions with a precise reason), frontal and close shot, always the same technique to create the stylistic identity of the pop Fenomeni group. Great attention is given to light details, contrasts, focalization, tonal scales: then the artist takes the definitive photo which will be printed with lambda technique on Kodak endure metallic paper, then edit on dibond aluminium.

Emerges a subtle empathy with those plastic looks: the Fenomeni’s eyes have got an uncommon specific weight, the posings directly communicate with us, seeming to call us, asking for something, inviting us to play with whit life, bringing out not only our ironic and sentimental side , but also our more dynamic and dreaming nature, as if those faces became the universal subjects of an iconography entering silently everyone’s double life.