Dependency – Copyright -Giovanni Presutti – 2010-2012 (inglese)

The world outlining in front of us requires to be explored by means of different artistic languages, in order to catch in depth the farthest frontier of reality. Italian photography of the last twenty years is renewing the approach on a reality in rapid growth, able to move away from the cliché of the past and to ripen new impulses finding in present-day the possibilities of expression exactly in the photographic tool. Irony and wrong-footing, communication strategies largely common among current culture, are those ones picked out by Giovanni Presutti in Dependency, photographic works reflecting on dependency as a mean of survival to contemporary life.

The author has a great synthesis skill that let him give a truthful picture of our society. He is able to make us smile in front of single images, but above all he fosters a careful and whole reflection on the man forced to take on a lot of different behaviours and the consequent habits, so that he lays his own weakness bare to us, his deep frailty that appears as his distinctive feature even if he doesn’t want to show it. The author can get to the heart of matter giving back information on who we are and on what characterizes our age. After all, photography continues remaining a tale of places, of persons, of continuous and systematic explorations around a reality in constant change.

It doesn’t matter whether he represents medicines or smoke or alcohol or the television, sex or shopping each of them has its own dependence, an obsessive tenure showing in a compulsive way that we must read as an alarm bell, the symptom of a starting unrest that flutters over the single man and extends over the whole society. However Presutti doesn’t choose a dramatic approach, he doesn’t want to emphasize the matter as it is common to some photographers of his generation. There isn’t rhetoric in his photos, his look is ironic but deep, amused but critic, the images are made up with a careful accuracy and exactness. When present, the colours are bright and modulated, able to lead the user’s eyes on the most significant aspects.

The language used by Presutti is similar to that one of fashion and publicity, he takes part in social discussion without that emphasis used by Oliviero Toscani in some of his famous photos, lacking in that desecrating style at all costs. He stages his dreams, his ideas and his nightmares as Maurizio Cattelan does in his editorial project Toilet Paper by means of Pierpaolo Ferrari’s lens. Giovanni Presutti likes enjoying himself with images creating, without fear, a connection between commercial photography and art.

Luca Panaro – Art critic - www.lucapanaro.net

Hello Dolly!

Giovanni Presutti – Copyright – 2013

The overbuilding of the territory is consuming an increasing share of agricultural area. Our suburbs are now clones of the city where shopping malls, multiplexes, industrial buildings, parking lots and social housing follow each other eroding the living space from which we derive our sustenance. In the near future Dolly, a doll of human size only survivor, wanders into a scene of degradation that has reduced the Earth to a pile of empty buildings and abandoned. The protagonist has a metaphysical significance inspired by anthropomorphic dummies of De Chirico. It 's an empty form, a container of images, memories and feelings vaguely human without a soul, it’s the projection of man's intellectual. Its plastic forms anonymous make it even stronger sense of loss of humanity, becoming a symbol of an era of consumerism and empty. Suggestions films and literature at the base of each image, which features the recall to the colors of the paintings of Edward Hopper and Philip K. Dick's sci-fi settings and theme that has inspired. The symbols in the consumption of our age, stripped of their function, become a totem worshiped by only a doll, no soul or intellect, showing a glimpse of the future towards which we are inexorably

Deja - vu or Aesthetics of the common moment.

(about Hipsta.nothing – Copyright – Giovanni Presutti – 2013 – English)

"A non taken picture is a memory that does not exist" George Eastman

380 billion shots.

380 million images uploaded on Facebook every day.

4 billion photos uploaded on Istagram up to July 2012 .

I Click, I register , I share . Everything in the real world is a potential subject .

The trigger is the mechanical equivalent by which man realizes and catches his identity. Self-assertion and control. Reading a photo inevitably means reading the mind and the ego of the author, perceiving the visual record of how the world appeared to him at the shooting.

In this society of liquid democratic photography , the image turns into an element of social virality.

The private history is a plural history. And in this orgy of visions and sharing, your memories become mine, and I find myself recalling moments that I have never lived. The digital revolution deprives photography of his inner soul , the one tied to memory. The images of the past succumb to the uninterrupted flow of auto presentations of the ego in the present. The new noema is "Now".

The mechanical eye of the smartphone is an unconscious organ of our socializing body, a sexual fetish that spies the rituals of daily life, a vehicle for taking possession of the feeling given by a glance and a moment. It is the apotheosis of the anonymous shot without aesthetic awareness. It is the glorification of a trivial present, personal privacy turning into a show and presence certification. It's a redundant exhibition of ourselves. Communication at its primary degree. An irregular and anarchic mass of images being absolutely replaceable.

As a modern digital narcissus , Giovanni Presutti gives us his ordinary moments that offer, as social masks of our ego, to anonymous pictures devourers voyeurs, engaged in a perverse and greedy aesthetic trade.

It's a deformed chaos of shots incapable of real significance, burdened by an affective realism without sentimentalism.

Ritual performances, culinary diaries, non-alphabetic moods tied to a moment where time does not exist because everything is repetition.

972 mute images (accompanied by 18 videos), filtered by Hipstamatic lens, are perfectly positioned in 18 Pop aesthetic panels, ideal frame for the symbolic exaltation of anonymous contemporary icons. And in the pressing repetition and multiplication of images Giovanni Presutti reveals the hegemony of multiple on the original, the victory of the photographic ephemeral and the stunning of the Nothing. In a universe of pictures free from aesthetic disturbances, far from reflections on the philosophy of seeing or on the images ambiguity, the photographic work of Presutti reveals an anxiety of perfection that triggers a short circuit between the contemporary exasperation of aesthetics and the paucity of content.

Photographers VS Photographators

The excess of vision mangling the world beauty. "Rushing from one thing to another, without looking carefully, we lose everything. We need to stop. To look

at beside the mere watching. "

Benedetta Scannapieco art critic, 2014

THE ISLAND.

Elba island is located in Italy, in Tuscany , and is a national park , but it could be anywhere. It represents the synthesis of our relationship with the environment around us, and especially with the sea. The “ mare nostrum” is full of plastic. The pollution in this area, maybe because of the unfavorable current, from the analysis carried out recently reaches 892,000 microfragments of plastic per square kilometer, and the reality on land is no less . The beaches, the vegetation, the woods are too often treated as landfill. Opposite views of incomparable beauty are, implanted as parasites, our waste, the signs of our passage and of the degradation of our contemporary society, which respects nothing but to consume.