© created by Roberto Colombo
La Forma - Il Dono
"La Forma il Dono" was born after a visit to the exhibition "Forms of Desire," dedicated to the great and controversial American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, curated by Denis Curti and on display at the Palazzo Reale in Milan.
Since its inception, photography has undergone profound transformations, always seeking new ways to strengthen the narrative and message of images. Its language, at times complex and at times minimal, often brilliant, has influenced the work of great artists. Images communicate through artifices that open to different interpretations: blurs capable of evoking emotions, compositional rules followed or subverted with the freedom typical of great photographers.
Visiting the exhibition sparked in me the desire to rediscover a language oriented towards the essentiality of the forms and gestures of classical art. The structures of the human body, the postures and details present in works such as Rodin's The Thinker, Canova's Italian Venus, or Myron's Discobolus inspired me to create a diptych in which this essentiality dialogues with the forms of nature. Through a still life, the comparison brings together lines, minimalist geometries, and equally essential natural forms.
Hence the title "The FORM": the structures, physicality, and lines that shape the human figure and gesture, just like the flower, the stalk of rye in the bottle, or simple orchids. Form thus becomes a GIFT, that is, beauty: something given to us, something we neither produce nor possess. We can recognize it, value it, and extol it with gratitude, but in its essence, it remains a gift.
