MARIO GIACOMELLI ^©  

(Senigallia, 1925 - Senigallia, 2000)

(Diptych) 2 vintage gelatin silver prints

Cm 27 x 36 (left) and 30 x 40 (right)

Both signed, stamped Via Mastai 6 and annotated on verso

Each framed (dark grey wood + plexi) size cm 42 x 52 x 2,5

Original provenance: the artist, Senigallia Italy

Mario Giacomelli’s picture is a pattern of dark shapes on a gray ground, all revolving around the small boy who levitates within the halo of the worn footpath, framed by the trembling wintry crones - two of a presumably endless line that scuttle past like the mechanical targets in a shooting gallery. The first pattern seems at first glance almost symmetrical, but its balance is in fact not so simple: the frame has been shifted leftward from the boy to accommodate the weight of the three figures in the upper lefthand corner. These three vertical strokes relate to the two black strokes of the figures above the boy’s head, and the two formed by the feet of the foreground figure, all of these together describing one of the several triangles of which the picture seems to be constructed.

The black squares of the windows in the upper right are equally part of the life and rhythm of the picture as can be easily demonstrated by covering them with a swatch of gray paper. Such analysis is of course irrelevant except as a way of wondering why the picture has succeeded. Analysis was surely useless to Giacomelli during the thin slice of a second during which this picture was possible, before the black shapes slid into an irretrievably altered relationship with each other, and with the ground and frame.

It seems in fact most improbable that a photographer’s visual intelligence might be acute enough to recognise in such a brief and plastic instant the pictorial (two dimensional) significance of the action unfolding in the deep stage before his lens.

Yet many photographers of recent years have educated their instincts so well that they do precisely this, and anticipate their results within narrow tolerances.

John Szarkowski