Gianfranco Pezzot

Iconography of Violence (Abstract Photography)

2020

Gianfranco Pezzot is an Italian conceptual photographer, who is interested in how various forces, such as history, economics, and instinct, affect the ways we construct and make use of our environment. His abstract work is an attempt at inventing new, contemporary photographic languages. He lives and works in Italy. To push the boundary of photography as an artistic medium. Pezzot has adopted an aesthetic strategy akin to assemblage, bringing various, possibly unrelated visual elements together in the construction of a new image. His abstract series Dichotomy of a Human Brain is emblematic of this approach. It was created by combining fragments of photographs of flowers, beach landscapes and crumpled sheets of paper then using that assemblage as a ground for additional artistic interventions such as drawn lines and scribbled text. The various images and mediums combine to create a complex, layered image, presented in its final form as a digital C-print. Pezzot is inspired by the way the brain constructs narratives from different images. When those images are altered, restructured, or combined with other images, the narrative becomes less straightforward and more interesting to try to interpret. He is also influenced by the changing role of photography as a contemporary artistic medium. He wonders about the value of shooting direct, unambiguous pictures compared to the value of approaching photography from a more open, investigative, experimental and multi-disciplined perspective.