Mondolfo at the Fototeca de Cuba

On Thursday Dec. 9 at 5:00 pm, the grand opening of Concept Beauty, an exhibition by photographer Giorgio Mondolfo (El Cairo, 1952), will take place. Fototeca de Cuba (Cuba’s Photographic Library) will be hosting this exhibition –based on the investigation and curatorship by Cristina Vives– that’s expected to make people rivet their attention on a couple of aspects: on the one hand, the exquisite composition of the works –especially his mastery of light- and his experiments with colors, mostly achieved from the fixed margins of analogical photography and traditional labs in years in which the niceties and dynamism of digital photography were unthinkable; and on the other hand, for its being a one-and-only event within the Cuban context.

It’s all about a set of photographs that blend beauty and fashion from the latter’s world –a competitive universe the artist has been involved in since the 1970s while he was a Philosophy & Esthetics student- sprinkled by his inquiries on the subject in an odd and fascinating mixture of market, romantic sensuality and humanism. For one of his first fashion assignment, Mondolfo brought his client’s clothes to his classmates and took shots of them wearing those garments in a popular market in town: since then to date, his photographs have been surreptitiously intertwined with the product’s publicity and his personal esthetics of beauty and the flow of his view of what the world is.

Beautyis a sophisticated industry of production, creation and thinking capable of outsmarting our expectations of the real and the must, yet they are splayed in real images, in convincing referents photographically speaking. Beauty is a concept that stalks the human body and is realized in it, in the products created to boost it up. Therefore, the photographer of Beauty is both the director and creators of a visual realm that, like the moviemaking industry, becomes the steppingstone of a complex trapping of interests.

These photographs were mostly conceived on the basis of contracts signed with agencies and world-class magazines (Harpers’ Bazaar, Amica, Cosmopolitan, Donna Moderna, Anna, Grazia, among others), and pulled off in a number of different locations.

Source: E-mail Invitation. Text by Cristina Vives. Havana, Oct. 2010