Minimal views

Mari Feni's photographs play on contrast to evoke a surreal and minimalist world. The black and white, the emphasis of the lines and the ethereal light reveal the acute synthesis of thought and image pursued by the artist: his extreme visual conciseness brings out suspended images in a timeless dimension. Everything seems wrapped in quiet, crystallized in an eternal present. The manipulation is used to strip the simplicity of the composition from any accessory element, obtained by combining, in a perfect balance, inspiration and technical construction, everything is resolved in shapes and shadows.
Adherence with the real world is reduced to the presence of the horizon line, which as a music sheet note, marks the rhythm of space, defines its proportions, sometimes disappears completely accentuating the idea of a spatiality that extends infinity. The setting, rather than a real space, is transformed into an abstract, mirroring surface, sometimes similar to a pattern. The landscape contracts to zero, while the main focus on which the attention converges entirely becomes those presences that stand out in the composition: bodies, trees, clouds.
Mari Feni places at the center of his research a reflection on the singularity of the individual and his relational system. Emblematic is the diver's figure caught in the static moment of recollection that precedes the jump, or suspended in the void: it is the moment in which man faces the uncertainty of the future, it is courage, resourcefulness, the turning point, but it is also to fall into nothing, the solitude of life. His minimalist vision leaves room for a void full of suggestions; the light becomes emotional condensation, while the harmony of the forms emphasizes the lyricism of the images. The absence of color accentuates the expressive power of the figures, whose metaphysical rereading becomes conceptual revelation: photography, rather than documenting, interprets the condition, realistic or potentially realistic, of being in its tautological evidence.


Flavia Motolese


gallery@marifeni.com

Mari Feni