Mimmo Jodice

This solo exhibition presents, in a retrospective path specially designed by the artist for the spaces of the Madre museum, more than a hundred works divided into various sections, closely linked and evoking a circular time, cyclically recurring on itself and its inspiring motifs.

From this there emerges all the ideational and compositional freedom of a photographic practice that he began, for that matter, as an autodidact, in the late 1950s, not with the use of camera or film but with the use of an enlarger, and then with the extra-photographic concepts of time (exposure) and (degree of) brightness.

And if, since 1980, the human figure has disappeared from these works what Jodice attains is the ineffable eternity and absolute clarity of images in black and white rendered by the revelatory gaze of a camera that becomes a “time machine” (or, rather, a machine recording the passing of time), in its enchanted patrolling of the world, from the gut of Naples to the shores of the Mediterranean, with their vestiges of ancient civilizations that have now disappeared, up to the uncertain confines of globalized megacities.

From this there emerges all the ideational and compositional freedom of a photographic practice that he began, for that matter, as an autodidact, in the late 1950s, not with the use of camera or film but with the use of an enlarger, and then with the extra-photographic concepts of time (exposure) and (degree of) brightness.

Each of these photos becomes the supreme celebration of humanity, taken by observing reality in all its sense expressions and transformed into a photographic reality that, apart from different eras and contexts, coincides with the constant reinvention of photography itself, liberated from a purely documentary interpretation, free to express its representative and cognitive potential.

The exhibition begins and ends in the Re_PUBBLICA Madre gallery on the ground floor, where a selection of images from the series dedicated, in the 1960s and 1970s, to the city of Naples can be seen, screened in the format of a great cinematic projection (Teatralità quotidiana a Napoli, 2016).