…After all photography is like writing: the landscape is full of signs, symbols, wounds, of hidden things. It is an unknown language that you begin to read, to know when you start to love it, photograph it.
So the sign becomes voice: it clarifies me some things, for others remains just a spot… (Mario Giacomelli).

The project concept of Lifeblood, the last photographic project by Karim Carella, dates back to 2011. At that time the Apulian artist had envisioned a series of images which, following a strict approach based on black and white and essential figurative grammar, should represent and evoke the vital cycle of life through a pure figurative documentation of the passing of the seasons as observed in the plant kingdom.

Essential grammar and extreme reductionism of the image, all built on the primary signs of horizontal, vertical, oblique and curved lines, aimed at research hidden geometries: So were at first developed the shots in Lifeblood. Signs, symbols, wounds, hidden things in the landscape, a sign that becomes a voice, as Giacomelli writes.

However, the choice of subjects and the way to portrayed them has never been fully convincing for the artist. He felt those images and subjects lacked something because they tended to show too much. Therefore Lifebood remained unfinished and was set aside.

Thanks to the abstract breakthrough taken by the artist and deepened in the last 5 years the concept of Lifeblood resurfaces and comes to a new form and life. So in 2022, 11 years after its first conception, the final step was taken: the artist radically modifies his perspective and concentrates on a single subject as absolute symbol of the alchemical opus to be portrayed.

The idea of landscape photography intended as a simple mirror of the real world finally gives way to the new shots of Lifeblood, which tend to evoke the Stimmung of the artist himself, capture the synaesthesia, explore imaginary spaces and reverie and transform real and existing subjects into …subjects that have never been known before.

Black and white is abandoned in favour of a dominant chromatic charge and images become very structured with a marked textured imprinting. Karim Carella chooses to dig into the image to display endless evocative possibilities: in Lifeblood the tree trunk is the unique subject which is observed very closely and vivisected in each hidden and apparently insignificant detail.

The trunk propagates and isolates in space in search of light in a macro perspective that reveals hidden, flowing details, tortuous veins, deep grooves piercing the whole scene. They are inspired and harsh shots showing a different reality: The tree becomes the metamorphic mirror of a natural ecosystem that, albeit the suffering, resists, changes and breaths.

The modern artist works to express an interior world…expresses the movement, the energy and other inner forces. (Vassily Kandynsky)

Karim observes his apparently immovable mutants and their lymph, flowing and creeping in the folds of time, with a strong sense of perturbation.

The series of images from Lifeblood 2022 is available here.

Click here to see the Lifeblood gallery