Exhibition expanded: Un minuto di fotografia

Remaining devoted, without once straying, to the austerity and intractable asceticism of the 1970s, Vimercati continued to develop – for thirty years – the model of photographic series and sequences, shunning the status of the single image as autonomous and self-sufficient, separate from that infinity of relationships that make each moment a composite of multiple layers, stratified and concatenated into barely different folds, producers of meaning. Vimercati obstinately concentrated on time by reducing the superfluous: no colour beyond black and white, no interesting subjects, no virtuous composition, no different camera lens, nothing anecdotal. And still: no psychologism, no representation, nothing but canonical framing, no exercise in style. Essentially: “until there was nothing left except the shot.”

Marco Scotini, One Minute and the Possible. Franco Vimercati and The Photographic Time. Published in Franco Vimercati. Un minuto di fotografia (Macerata: Quodlibet, 2020).

Do you use photography for investigation or as research? For me it is of fundamental importance that the final object of my work be discreet, not unwieldy, light and fragile, like a sheet of paper that has been touched by light. That would be enough. Then, it’s the only way to render my inclinations tangible for observation and analysis – which lead to replication, to comparison – and in the end to an essential component that I find very stimulating: the shooting, developing the film, the printing, the paper itself.

Angela Madesani, A Conversation with Franco Vimercati. Milan, 1998. Published in G. Panza di Biumo, A. Madesani, eds., Franco Vimercati. Fotografie dal 1973 al 2001, exhibition catalogue (Varese, Villa e Collezione Panza-Como, Associazione culturale Borgovico 33) (Rovereto: Edizioni Stella, 2008). Now in M. Scotini, Op. cit.

It is difficult to find any other work to rival the singularity of this project, which was developed slowly, silently, and in solitude in a time marked by the growing proliferation of images and the tumult provoked by the birth of the internet. It is, therefore, quite safe to say that any history of pre-digital photography will find its most convincing epilogue in this Milanese artist.

Javier Hontoria, Dense Time. Franco Vimercati, published in E. Grazioli, Archivio Franco Vimercati, eds., Franco Vimercati: la fotografia, la vita. Un dialogo con Giorgio Morandi / Franco Vimercati: la fotografía, la vida. Un diálogo con Giorgio Morandi, exhibition catalogue (Madrid, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, 2019). Now in M. Scotini, Op. cit.

Works from Franco Vimercati’s Soup Toureen and Upside-Downs series are presented in two groupings that mirror the layouts Vimercati himself designed for the 7th issue of Ipso Facto, a contemporary art magazine directed by Elio Grazioli, in the year 2000.

They’re upside down because that’s photography; the object is projected onto the plate upside down, and therefore turning it right-side-up in order to make it intelligible didn’t interest me. What interested me was that photography would take place, the occurrence of the photographic event, not the ability to “read” the object. On one hand, this took away the possibility of reading the object; it is no longer decipherable as a glass, but as a shape. On the other hand, I was no longer part of it, I stayed neutral; photography is one thing, and I am another. Very objective... all my work is very objective. I use the language as it is. When it’s out of focus, that’s the way it is. It’s not as though I’m inventing the out-of-focus. I use, I extract... I haven’t invented a thing. My usage is specific. I extract that particular aspect of the language.

Franco Vimercati, in Elio Grazioli, A Conversation with Franco Vimercati, Milan, 2000. Excerpt from Franco Vimercati: Works, exhibition catalogue (Venice, Palazzo Fortuny) (London: John Eskenazi Publications, 2012). Now in M. Scotini, Op. cit.

From 1983 onwards, absolute silence reigns in Vimercati’s photographs. Captured in mineral immobility, the object at the centre of the image seems to exclude even the possibility that sound might exist. Sometimes a shiny surface offers a glimpse of the surrounding environment: a window reflected in the soup tureen, the view of the buildings through the window in a glass. But that impression of the world doesn’t allow any movement or bustle to filter into the frame. Even the multiple exposures of 1999, in which several images of the same object – a glass – are overlapped for a “blurred” effect, are no exception to the rule. The glass that seems to vibrate before our very eyes is like the alarm clock beneath the glass bell jar in a popular physics experiment: the sound does not travel because the air has been sucked out from the bell jar. We see the frenetic movement of the hammer, but nothing encroaches on the silence.

Simone Menegoi, Photographing photography. Four reflections on Franco Vimercati, Brochure published on the occasion of the exhibition Franco Vimercati (Milan, Galleria Raffaella Cortese, 2016). Now in M. Scotini, Op. cit.