Karim Carella presents his new project at Affordable 2020
Karim Carella arrives late to photography, with a degree in Statistical Sciences and a life in search of spaces suitable for his insatiable creativity, which will lead him to abandon his work and life in Milan attracted by the primordial need of the sea. Karim’s journey in photography is a journey in search of himself, or perhaps only of his place in the world, in a gradually more conscious and autobiographical way.
Fascinated since childhood by the poignant landscapes of the countryside and coasts of southern Italy, he begins to explore the deeper meaning of the visible, a universe in which the human figure is banned but whose action takes a leading role in the conformation of the landscape: the agricultural fields (Tyrsenoi, 2017), the incredible marine spaceships of the trabucchi (Phoenician fishing, 2012), the cliff dominated by the lighthouse or by mysterious stone constructions (Guardians of the sea and Atlantic sights, 2018).
The gradual and growing selection of shapes and tones, thanks also to the purification of the chromatic compositions, reaches a concept of photography immobile in time and isolated in space, and to representations increasingly tending towards the abstract. This research, which apparently assumes the risky connotations of a formalistic, almost snobbish attitude, actually reveals the search for a new code, capable of emphasizing the cry of pain of the violated nature.
Oblivium
Oblivium is the new project by Karim Carella previewed at the Affordable Art Fair in Milan 2020. Here he proposes some shots taken between 2017 and 2019, offering us multiple perspectives of his new way of conceiving photography. Karim investigates new fields of research deeply inspired by inner life, in an attempt to sublimate form as a symbol, simulacrum, icon of one’s values.
The love for nature, for the sea in particular, and man’s awareness of the threat, lead him to select progressively more and more abstract forms in which to dissolve almost every call to reality. An unknown alphabet, synthesized in a primordial sign of horizon, obsessively repeated in its almost infinite combinations.
Long exposures and the water that fades into a flow of tones that softens the sea, clouds, sand, in a captivating dream flight. Primordial elements scrambled on a single plane, and then redesigned on layers with different coordinates, on a rarefied, mobile, fantastic background. It is a research in which the photographic language embarks on a courageous journey towards the abstract dimension. A process of transcendence that brings us back to the avant-garde of the twentieth century.
An aesthetic theory of Einfühlung, which suggests a passage to a deeper plane of perception, in which everything acts in relation to the affine that is in us; an exploration that goes beyond the referentialism of figurative photography to arrive at an extreme geometric and unpredictable subjectivism.
The works exhibited here represent an almost disturbing metaphysical calm, in which the negation of the perspective space frees the author in the composition of pure forms such as the line and the plane. A photographic genre that no longer wants to represent objects but aspires to the construction of an objective order, a Sachlichkeit that concludes the journey from expressionist subjectivism to arrive at the ethical value of the art of denunciation. It is nature that screams and rebels against the threat of man. The decisive task of Karim’s most recent artistic production is to make visible, not reproduce what is already visible. Art does not make visible: it reveals (Paul Klee).
edited by Arch. Saverio Cioce