Studio d' A.C.
Valentina Zatta
05/06 - 09/07 1999
Brescia

"Photography is writing as light, an indelible trace of an instant, a paper fossil which preserves the imprint of
what is past. Roberto Saletti is attracted precisely by the contrast between memory and transience, between
escape and persistence.
 
A part of his work is centred on the swift passage of hesitant characters of whom remain only blurred shapes, sometimes almost disintegrated: in one you can only see a leg, a ghostly limb, absent and present in the same moment.
 
Another aspect is that which sees him dwell on the strongest and most enduring element: rock, stone excavated, worked and shaped to become a tomb: perpetual testimony, never fading , of passing and passing away
 
Stories and history, big and small, which melt and mix. Deaths which yield ghosts, vestiges of shadows.
On one hand you feel the influence of Anton Giulio Bragaglia's futurist "Fotodinamica", speed plus
transparency, on the other you are conscious of Mario Sironi's paintbrush-chisel, of his material painting, completely homeric (in conception).
It is not a contradiction but the same condition of photography:   to halt and block what is destined to flow with time, to vanish. Bodies repossessed by the living who are virtually already dead, or soon will be,
conserved in a  chemical grave as deep as a simple sheet of paper. "

Pablo Echaurren

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