francesco patriarca

Patriarca’s presence with his camera, and his interest in this seemingly unspectacular fragment of the everyday drew reaction from a local boy who took it upon himself to disrupt both the artist and the camera. Acting through unprompted intervention the boy moved the coffee cup in an apparent bid to unsettle the activity of the artist. The boy having reconfigured the event of first photograph, choosing to precariously balance the cup on both its saucer and accompanying spoon therefore disrupting the order that pre-existed when the cup sat neatly on the saucer, offered an altered aesthetic and Patriarca seized the opportunity to take a second photograph. In turn Patriarca’s action provoked a further response from the boy, an unspoken conversation of action and reaction unfolded leading the coffee cup to become upturned, its content flooding the saucer, before reaching a final act of unequivocal assuredness in which the boy hurled the cup to the floor smashing it. Again Patriarca’s camera both responded and recorded. This describes one of many exchanges between Patriarca and an anonymous protagonist, each exchange specific to a chance set of parameters culminating in each case in an altercation through which rationality can only by considered as relational to time and place. What emerges from these works is a series of social exchanges that both describe and expose misalignments of language. The inconsistency of context and the relational aesthetics that are derived from the commonplace performance of encounter highlights the gaps in the everyday through which both the profound and the nonsensical emerge.

Working in Medium and Large format photography Patriarca allows these situations to unfold at their natural rate, their recitation becomes a miniaturised drama in which the camera is participant, sympathetic to the moments of activity enacted from each side, the action of event replicates the very activity of photography, replicating the still pause and momentary lapse during which the shutter snaps. The mechanical intervention of Patriarca’s camera sits outside of a digital age; its frames offer a performative narration between artist, object and cohort, sequential these frames elicit animated order. The images themselves are edited, sequences of time exist between the frames that Patriarca presents, this removal not only serves to slow the reading, aligning it further with the mechanical attributes of the technology used, but also to erase human presence. The activity, conversation, and confrontation that Patriarca describes through these works occur in the spaces between the photographs, these are unseen, just as the conversations / altercations are themselves non-verbal. The photographs we are left with are devoid of human representation and yet it is figuration that their content draws us towards; from a discarded coffee cup, or a cardboard box filled with stones, to a torn theatre curtain, the absence of figures belies the tangible aura of human activity.

Within the beautiful-calm of Patriarca’s photographs something else emerges in the form of undisclosed tension. The absolute attention to detail bequeathed by the artist on his subject seems to stretch their visual fabric, the potential of their image. The photographs are perceptively stretched to the point at which they become so taut as to almost appear to snap. This fictional stretching underscores the ‘actual’ tension that is manifest in the silent conversations, confrontations, that exist around the making of the works, the non-verbal altercation between artist and other - in the case of Elektro Market between Patriarca and a young boy, in the case of Boxes (2007) between Patriarca and an elderly Albanian lady. What is exposed through these series’ of works, social tableau’s, is a brooding underplay of menace, a tension and aggression that sits close to the surface. Agitated by misaligned exchanges in which language is used to counter a set of emotions and anxieties, the works show in their apparent silence how these tensions rise to the surface, emerging in unexpected places, across social divides, cities and borders.