Press release
JAN DIBBETS
BILLIONS OF UNIVERSES
7.10 – 23.12.2021 | extended to 29.01.2022
Inauguration Thursday, 7 October, 3 – 8 p.m. – the Green Pass is mandatory to attend the event
After the large-scale installation in 2007, on 7 October 2021 Galleria Giorgio Persano will be presenting a new solo exhibition by Jan Dibbets entitled Billions of universes at Via Stampatori 4, Turin. The exhibition consists of large photographs taken over the last decade.
In NewColorStudies, the artist takes details of car bodies, reflecting the surrounding landscape, taken in analogue for his historic ColorStudies of the 1970s, enlarging the negative to obtain monochrome digital images. Asking the question “What would happen if I were to take away the image’s structure?”, with this work of subtraction of the datum of reality – which is never completely lost – the artist invites us to enter new possible abstractions.
The same process, but taken to the extreme, also applies to the B.O.U. series. All the works come from one negative of the ColorStudies of 1976, divided vertically into two parts. The artist has enlarged them with a digital processing programme, accidentally creating abstract compositions of colours and shapes, underlining the primary role of technologies in the representation of what we perceive.
According to Dibbets, indeed, “reality is an abstraction”; everything depends on the how, on the way we experience it. Perception is a transformative process that intervenes directly in the construction of the world. If there is no objective and universal reality, photography should not be understood as a documentary and neutral representation, but always implies a creative dimension linked to the technical means in use in a given historical period. Citing the philosopher V. Flusser, the artist states: “Those virtualities are practically inexhaustible. No photographer can hope to shoot all possible photographs. The camera imagination is much larger than any single photographer’s imagination, or indeed than the imagination of all photographers in the world. This is the precise challenge of photography.”
In both the monochrome NewColorStudies works (2010-2014) and the B.O.U. (series 2019), the thematisation of the transition from analogue to digital images is central. It is therefore a question of understanding what the perceptual effects of this transition are and to what kind of reality they give us access. With these works, Jan Dibbets thus offers us the key to the billions of universes that open up before us when we try to look beyond what we see.
Artworks of exhibitions
