Peeling Back the Layers
Michael Charlesworth
The work of the quietly playful Italian artist Paolo Giolo (1942-2022) involves experimentation in more than one medium. He became a film-maker after a trip to New York in the 1960s, when he saw the work of Stan Brakhage and other experimental film-makers who have become famous for their physical manipulation of the celluloid film itself. A photographer who was also interested in the history of photography, Gioli made his film Finestra Davanti ad un Albero (Window in front of a Tree, 1989) in the one hundred and fiftieth year following the simultaneous invention of photography in both France and Britain. In this film, and in his accompanying photographs, Gioli, by virtue of his inventiveness, emulated, perhaps even in his own mind was communing with, the early pioneers of photography. In France, the artist L. J. M. Daguerre's invention was announced to the world in January 1839; in Britain, a different method invented by William Henry Fox Talbot became public a few weeks later. Both characters had been working on their respective methods for years. Fox Talbot's invention inaugurated the negative-to-positive photographic principle that eventually became predominant. This enabled the reproducibility of the photographic image, which is hinted at near the end of Gioli's film by the shelves of lithographic stones. One of the effects of the film is to suggest a series of rapidly flashed photographs, and in fact plenty of Fox Talbot's own photographs are shown - the haystack, the silver, the sculpture and so on - gleaned from the book in which Talbot celebrated his method, The Pencil of Nature (1844). The cover of this itself makes an appearance in the film, being held by Talbot's assistant, Nicolaas Henneman. These elements are interspersed with short sections showing or implying movement: the rising and fading of the light at beginning and end; a cat; trees moving in the wind; the photographed hand of Fox Talbot or his assistant, compared with a larger, moving, more muscular hand, perhaps that of Gioli himself. The invention of photography, and film's debt to photography, become firmly grasped together by virtue of this explicit Structuralist approach. To call it an 'explicit structuralist method', however, would limit acknowledgement of the effects of the film. Structuralist films are notoriously oblique for audiences conditioned to narrative cinema.
At first in Finestra Davanti ad un Albero, rapid alternation of images makes the film seem to exude insistence - a nagging claim for our attention. They communicate an urgency, and fragility. Later we see the paraphernalia of elegance in the silver vessels, alongside the physicality of nature and the implied work that it requires on a farm. Gioli has opened the door. There we are in 1989, in a house not far from Venice, with a cat for company, contemplating Fox Talbot's gentlemanly world. Yet hands imply handwork. The film's agitated claim for our attention changes to something compelling. On 16 mm film, Gioli creates a meditation on materialism, on one side, and soul on the other. And the manifestation of soul is characteristic within Gioli’s works of art.
At one moment in the film there is figured the inevitable flaw, like the thumb-mark deliberately made by a Japanese potter in his or her perfect vessel. Fox Talbot's photograph of books on shelves that we see in the film was labelled by him, 'Scene in a Library'. Historians of photography persist in discussing this photograph as if it were a scene in a library. The photograph, however, shows no such thing. The books had to be taken outside and placed on planks on Fox Talbot's lawn before there was enough light for the photograph to be made, as no interior space harboured enough light to produce a good photograph. So, for the inventor, there was more going on, whether we think of it as inventiveness or mendacity, than the truth to life so often alleged to be the alpha and omega of photography, its assumed badge of reliability and the guarantee of its uniqueness. We still tend to think of photography, and the media derived from it, as automatic, even industrial. Yet here, as in Gioli's film, there was craft, in a rather different meaning of the word.
Other leaves from The Pencil of Nature shown in the film reveal botanical studies. Fox Talbot's invention, often termed paper-negative photography, also inaugurated a heroic period of intense experimentation, lasting some twelve years, during which scientists and others tried to find improved methods for making negatives and the positive prints derived from them. Light-sensitivity of the chemicals used was a crucial issue, as the facts behind Talbot's subterfuge about his 'Scene in a Library' show. The scientist Robert Hunt, for example, reflected on the fact that plants are sensitive to sunlight. He picked blooms of different species, brayed them in a mortar to create a sort of juice, or gunge, smeared it onto paper, exposed it to light, and awaited the results. Which proved disappointing. From these experiments, some pieces of paper with shapeless brown stains on them still survive in collections of historical photographs, such as that in the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center of the University of Texas at Austin.
This heroic age of experimentation is called to mind by Gioli's photographic works. The Polaroid process he used to make them, via SX-70 polaroid negatives, in normal use produces a unique positive image, as the negative part of the processing sleeve is usually thrown away. There is a resonance here with the early photographic processes that produced only one positive print. The most famous of these, invented by Daguerre, in fact became the most used form of photography before 1851. It captured its unique image fairly quickly on a metal plate. In such ‘daguerreotypes’, the focus, and the replication of detail, was astonishing. But we should remember, as Gioli and his collaborator and producer Paolo Vampa did, the invention in France by the unfortunate Hippolyte Bayard of a method for producing a unique positive photograph on paper. This technique unhappily combined the limitations of both Daguerre's and Talbot's methods: lack of ability to reproduce the image, together with a slower exposure time and the imperfect result (slight lack of focus) caused by capture of light using wet chemicals on writing paper. Happily for us, Gioli's experimental use of polaroid film, eliminating the standard factory-produced Polaroid positive print in order to make his own strange and compelling work, salutes the early nineteenth-century inventive culture of photography while avoiding imperfect printing. By removing the photographic package from the camera, and peeling back the covering, he was able to vary the results, which included sun-prints, away from the conventional effect. There is no absolute standard of printing for Gioli's photographs: rather, each one, being hand-made, brings its own uniqueness. At the same time, the handwork is implied rather than shown, (except for one shot in the film of a brushstroke depositing paint). Photograph + plant = lack of overt handwork.
Early pioneers’ interest in botany was hardly confined to experiments with light-sensitivity, and their frequent efforts in making photographic botanical specimens is alluded to in Gioli’s photographs. As Annie Farrer clarified for me some years ago, botanical drawings have to show clearly not only the parts of a plant, down to the roots, but even the connections and precise forms of connection between the parts. However beautiful and satisfying they may be to look at, those properties mean that botanical illustration is often dominated by an immaculate distancing analytical atmosphere. In Gioli’s works, by contrast, we see apparently improvised and even accidental marks left over from their making. He managed to create a delicate colouration, akin to nineteenth-century experiments with photographic colour, by printing colour negatives on black and white paper. Gioli’s work thus differs from such botanical specimen-making in favour of an effect of poetic absorption, where contemplation of the vagaries of making, and of the subject for its own sake, are a strong achievement. The resulting images of leaves and petals, no matter how robust they may actually be, communicate fragility, and transience. Close up, a very delicate ramification of what we call veins can be seen in the leaves, indicating that leaves are fed and grow by means of energy derived directly from sunlight (are trees therefore more advanced beings than we are?) and nutrients absorbed by and transported from the roots. Patterns of growth in the plants, strange backgrounds in the works, colours like hallucinations, enhanced textures, inexplicable borders, are all wrapped within the impression of an extraordinary act of attempted preservation. Improvised, in the sense that Gioli could not predict how his experiments with the materials would turn out.
The feeling of these photographic prints and the film is ultimately one of value: the trees and leaves from Gioli's garden, like the leaves photographed by Fox Talbot, only survive as images of themselves, pressed by direct-contact cameraless photography, or captured through a camera. They are relics, remains - relics of life, testifying about themselves as much as about human life. Unlike some of Gioli's other work that concentrates on the human body, these are relics of the life of the natural world that until recently went on without our interference - and so they are all the more poignant in our time of human-made global overheating.
Dreeing the weird of life in Austin, Texas, 2024
Michael Charlesworth
Professor Emeritus, Art History (18th and 19th Century British and European Art)
The University of Texas at Austin
Department of Art and Art History
Paolo Gioli
Solo exhibitions include Anthological/Analogue, Lecce, Museo Castromediano / Bisceglie, Palazzo Tupputi and Beijing, Three Shadows Photography Art Centre (2021), The Nude in the work of Paolo Gioli, Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London (2018) Anthropolaroid, American Academy, Rome (2018), Gioli e i pittori, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan, Italy (2018), Museum of Contemporary Photography in Cinisello (2008), Paolo Gioli. Fotografie, dipinti, grafica, film, P.zzo Esposizioni in Rome (1996), P.zzo Fortuny in Venice and at the Alinari Museum in Florence in (1991). His works are in the collections of many important European and American museums, including the Pompidou Center, the Art Instritute of Chicago and MoMA in New York.
