Photography Uncategorized

“Tropical Sighs” – new work from Caroline Gavazzi

Caroline Gavazzi is an Italian/French photographer who studied photography at Spéos Photographic Institute in Paris and at the London College of Communication in London (LCC).  She was recently awarded two prestigious prizes for her work; the Proposta Mia Award at the Mia Photo Fair 2017 in Milan, and the Grand Prize at the Fix Photo Festival 2017 in London. She will have a show of her work at the Milan gallery Glauco Cavaciuti Arte later this year.

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Currently, Caroline Gavazzi focuses on a genre of photography she classifies as Plastic, inspired by her culture and sensitivity. Overcoming a realistic vision, she tackles different subjects with a markedly symbolic take, often concentrating on the act of revealing what is concealed beneath appearance. To obtain this result, she carefully researches her projects, seeking original and non-repetitive solutions. She designs photographic installations that draw on three-dimensional effects and on the visual displacement created by layers of material, thus involving spectators, inducing them to approach and critically share the questions that her research produces on being and on her problematic relationship with reality. Caroline Gavazzi currently works and lives between Milan and London.

Below is a quote from a review of Caroline’s latest work, “Tropical Sighs”, written by Roberto Mutti, and translated from Italian to English by Chiara Scassa.

”Caroline Gavazzi has photographed a number of plants held in a greenhouse that both protects and imprisons them, depending on your point of view. Before photographing them, she observes and studies them, but it is the colours and indefiniteness of shapes that suggests to her a vision of the world such as the one of the artistic movement she loves and favours: Impressionism. Moving away from realism is her choice. Caroline Gavazzi also confronts herself with glass, the one through which she photographs these plants: she plays with light, focuses on the droplets that run across the glass, creating unexpected colour effects.

The dialogue between inside and outside is now more intimate, as it is the photographer herself who enhances the intensity of her feelings, the strength of the sensations she wishes to share with those observing her works. The plants are pervaded by intense vitality: you can notice it when they crowd towards visibility, when one lays a leaf on the surface of the glass, when a flower blooms silently removing itself with quiet modesty from direct sunlight. It is not, even though it would seem so, a fairy tale intuition – the most recent plant neurobiology research confirm how plants have an ability to “see”, chasing light, moving to seek it out; how they perceive sound through vibrations, and recognise the signs of danger.

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Caroline Gavazzi has a direct dialogue with the past, the one of Fox Talbot and his leaf imprisoned in glass. She wonders, is this a barrier used as protection to enable those plants to survive better, is this a glass cabinet inside which the conditions of an eco-system with an artificially-monitored equilibrium is created, or is this the prison from within which the plants send out a desperate call to freedom? The question remains by choice open. With her delicate and poetic approach, Caroline Gavazzi captures the atmosphere of a mysterious world through which a vibrant vitality floats through, like a single sigh.”

http://www.carolinegavazzi.com