Galleria Raffaella Cortese is pleased to dedicate, in the year of the 25th anniversary of its opening, an extensive retrospective — as a tribute — to Franco Vimercati, the artist with whom the gallery first opened in 1995. Un minuto [One minute], Vimercati’s third solo exhibition in Raffaella Cortese’s spaces, is curated by Marco Scotini and extends across all three exhibition venues in via Stradella, each dedicated to a decade of the artist’s activity, from the 1970s to the year 2000.
Isolated (by vocation and destiny), shy and uncompromising, Franco Vimercati transforms the photographic act into a radical gesture of measuring time; this places him among the most rigorous and original conceptual artists in Italy and beyond. Remaining devoted, without ever straying from it, to the austerity and the intractable asceticism of the Seventies, Vimercati continues to develop — throughout the course of his practice — a unique approach to seriality and photographic sequence, refraining from the canon of the single and absolute image. But in doing so, his activity is as distant from the Bechers’ systematic deduction as it is from Dibbets’ temporal and one-way sequences. Vimercati’s point of departure is to operate in time and against time (its passing, its consumption), in favor of another time, open to potential, to possibility.
The “minute” which the title refers to therefore alludes to the minimal character of Vimercati’s production (black/white, reduced selection of objects, concentration on a few shots) as well as the opposition between the particular chronological limit and the immeasurable dilation of time, which is sensible in Vimercati’s work.
Installation views
