Materia Series - Comp. nr. 32

Alessandro Idini, Italy

Born in Nuoro in 1961, passionate about photography since he was a boy, he completed his studies in Milan, at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated with full marks in 1986 with a thesis on the evolution of photographic portraiture since the early twentieth century until the 1980s. During the last year of the course of studies he began working as a photographer in the fashion field and created editorial services for "Beauty" magazines, small advertising campaigns for then emerging stylists and photographic portraits of contemporary Milanese artists; following graduation he decides to move to Paris where, however, the contrast between the too many compromises of the fashion world and his own alien nature leads him to abandon this world. Subsequently, after dedicating himself for many years to journalism and outdoor photography, at the dawn of the new millennium he began to dedicate himself to fine art photography, which he himself defined as "the possibility of working regardless of the concept of commission". With the series Flowers photographic work in the early 1910s, shot in the studio and in large analogue format, obtained international recognition from various art magazines and from some collectors of photographic works printed with the platinum-palladium technique. Subsequently, after a series on the urban landscape, he dedicated himself totally to the search for informal aesthetics; thus the Fragments, Ekpýrosis and Phaos series were born, characterized by the search for the abstraction of the everyday object, with its de-contextualization and destruction until its rebirth in a new image. But it is with the Materia series that research on the concept of informal perception in photography finds the ideal synthesis of the union between the expressive possibilities of form and the mechanical means of shooting, where the clash between fluids of different density and color creates extremely fleeting forms that they give life to compositions that last only for an instant, and then disappear into the material itself.