Alberto Storari

Diario di Bordo - Log Book

Eröffnung: Opening: Thursday, April 4th 2013, 7 PM
Exhibition: April 5th - May 18th 2013

Even if fine art has divided itself up into so many different directions (“Isms”) at the beginning of modernity, the two polar positions that appeared back then are still relevant: the reduction/abstraction of the perceptible to a pictorial and lingual minimum on the one hand and its expansion, including the dimensions of the un- and subconscious.
Alberto Storari’s work ties into the latter category, he distorts “real” images (photographs taken on his many short and long distance journeys) through the use of different techniques (painting, drawing, etching) and different support materials (tin foil, damast fabrics, silk papers,...) so much that the dimensions of the surreal, the imaginary seem to open up.
The subject, place and time (of the day) the pictures were originally taken are only partly and rudimentally visible, and through this the whole of the images eludes a clear definition. Storari decontextualises the real image that we are used to in such a way that he provides enough reference points for us to try, no – for us to want to recontextualise what he shows us. Where elements of the real image are obscured, erased, deformed and isolated from their context, new sensations are created, that are also associable with the perception of reality: far-sighted apparitions of light, night spaces or fog-like indifferences appear as well as near-sighted wall and pattern structures, translucent layers of colour or, as in his page-by-page reworkings of a printed copy of Hermann Mellville’s novel "Moby Dick", written characters.
Never does Alberto Storari cross over the line to the completely un-representational, it is more as if he is offering us “impressions” taken out of the huge field of possible perceptions of nature, city, culture..., and of time and space. Where the logic of (central) perspective spatial constructions (e.g. of the photographic image) starts to blur, spaces of multi-perspective perception and experience open up, that can lead from the ephemeral now to the remembered past as well as the underlying parts of our memory-archives, that are arranged differently from logical and scientific criteria. Storari’s “Log Books” are therefore chronicles and reflections of his own experience and impressions as well as guides to our very own spaces of experience, lying hidden in our bunts.

Lucas Gehrmann