ap:arente’mente

The data, after all, are merciless and call for attention and sharing: “In the sea, on the beaches, along the coasts, we are surrounded by plastic. In particular, as emerges from Legambiente’s Beach Litter 2022 survey conducted at 62 points along the coast, there are 834 pieces of waste for every 100 metres of beach, 84% of which are plastic and 46% are disposable objects. At the top of the waste list is plastic, followed by glass and ceramics, metal, paper and cardboard. And again: plastic bags, shopping bags and envelopes. […] We can therefore speak of a dustbin-sea: it must be said that in this case it is not so much industrial activities and fishing itself that are at issue, which also contributes to the disaster with the bad habit of throwing polystyrene boxes into the water, but rather our lifestyles, our daily habits. In fact, 54% of waste is of domestic origin and leftover plastic ends up in the sea, or on beaches, because we do not properly sort it. The polluters are us, conscious agents of a filth that we pay for three times over: defacing natural beauties where we may spend our holidays, inflating the costs necessary for reclamation, and even eating sometimes poisoned fish at the table’ (www.nonsprecare.it).

But, as already emphasised at the beginning, Ivano Piva gives his act of witnessing an effective artistic and conceptual value that reinforces its documentary and denunciation intentions. Supported first by a solid background in graphic design and advertising, and then by fashion and still-life photography, he selects the materials collected from the beaches – the real sites of an increasingly macroscopic environmental crime – such as bottles, corks, straws, hanks of fishing nets, various wrappings and everything that is the fruit of senseless consumerism and irresponsible carelessness, and then he re-composes them on an overhead projector to obtain photographic images with a strong visual impact. From such a process formally accomplished works are born, oxymorically abstract although obtained from very concrete and identifiable materials, often with echoes vaguely and intentionally referable to Kandinsky’s early abstract watercolours or to Paul Klee’s more structured works, with the paradox of plunging the spiritual and lyrical dimension of these into a far less poetic abyss of social and environmental decay.

The practice of reusing materials subtracted from the most banal everyday dimension for an aesthetic use has noble origins in art since the early 20th century but, for Ivano Piva, the reference is as precise and absolutely declared as ever: the work of the American photographer Irving Penn from whom he draws both for his classic style and in the peculiar presentation of figures and objects in strong contrast with a mostly white background. But the most direct consonance is above all with the Cigarettes cycles and, above all, Street Material presented at the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 1977, in which Penn photographed discarded, lost or abandoned objects in urban streets, transforming them into photographic subjects and placing himself, with this operation, at the crossroads of artistic and anthropological questions at the same time, in a sort of archaeology of the everyday whose ultimate aim was to give them a new aesthetic value.

The aim of Ivano Piva’s project is opposite: if Irving Penn celebrated the “treasures of the city’s waste” by transforming them into works of art, Piva, on the other hand, by exalting their formal qualities and orchestrating them into compositions that are seductive to the eye and intriguing in the interplay of quotations, does not aim to create works of art but rather visual traps, real attention-grabbers, and those forms that seduce and bewitch us with their “beautiful appearance” actually acquire the sinister meaning of a sort of memento mori for a contemporaneity adrift, victim and executioner of itself, unaware “ofthe terrible doubt of appearances, | of the final uncertainty, that we may be disappointed” (Walt Whitman).

Ivo Serafino Fenu