Un_natural Bestiary

• Prize
• Photographer
  Andrea Alessio, Italy
• Studio
  varianti srl

In this work Andrea Alessio collects, like an ancient bestiary, a series of images of animals. The forest does not frighten modern man anymore. Its night calls no longer echo as sinister in the imagination of children. There is little of the supernatural and the wild is no longer suggestive. In this disenchanted world, within which we have roamed far too long, Andrea Alessio knowingly undertook his journey. A journey in search of what remains of the beast. It is a journey that seems to be fed by the need for an understanding through the eyes. A look sometimes glassy, sometimes elusive and very often dead. Our animal nature is dead as well, closed on itself, situated among its artifices, almost like a bear caught between fake rocks. And so it may happen that we cannot distinguish a live animal, although with wounded instinct, from a stuffed animal, being both stern and awkward at the same time. Among these dioramas, among these small stages, Andrea Alessio moves for over 20 years without bias and with the specific and rigorous intention to engage perception and its boundaries. So it does not matter if we are in a museum in New York or at the zoo in Paris. The geography is nothing more than a scenic replica in which the animal is forced to spend its time. And so do we, because the way we perceive can become a prison like a cage for a lion. And this is a message, almost subconscious, which breathes through the pages of this bestiary.
However, a cross-reading of the images of Andrea Alessio can still surprise us with new dimensions of meaning, combinations of senses that transcend the space and time of the gaze.

I was born in Venice September 2, 1966.
After the high school I attended several courses, lectures and workshops with Italo Zannier, Gabriele Basilico, Franco Fontana, Jessica Backhaus, Guido Guidi, Silvia Camporesi, Roberto Salbitani, Paolo Costantini, Joakim Eskildsen, Mark Steinmetz, Machiel Boltman, Todd Hido.