''ABUSE'' A Book By Alessio Bolzoni And A Different Way Of Consuming Art

Like always in art, the photographer chooses an object -flowers indeed- to convey a different meaning, to unveil a hidden truth behind the curtain of the visible. This work needs to be looked at few times before grasping its real subject: violence, abuse, the documentation of a living organism that walks towards its death.

Alessio Bolzoni –a photographer who has signed campaigns for important brands such as Dior Homme and editorials for influential fashion magazines- in this work, drops all the fashion elements and turns his attention to the opposite direction, namely the kernel rather than the shell of human nature, and he does it with great delicacy, understatement, grace.

The Artist has collected flowers during few months, has patiently waited until they were almost, but-not-quite, dead and then shot them. That moment of passage between blooming and withering has been frozen in time by Bolzoni’s inspecting camera. It has been turned into a book, scientific –besides artistic- in its attempt to portray abuse and sufferance.

His book needs to be looked at slowly and carefully, and then leafed through again, until one does not see the flowers anymore, but only their sufferance, their despair, the upcoming shrivel, because these are the real subject that Bolzoni’s book portray. Dying flowers become the metaphor of happens to all living beings, including humans, the forgotten and violated ones.

There is something almost avant-garde in “Abuse” and that is precisely to be found in the fact that the book is not immediately understandable, is not shocking and based on the fast-and-furious consumption that Instagram and the web have imposed over contemporary image production.

Alessio Bolzoni uses few element, very repetitive and in many ways understated. In a world in which everything needs to be frantic and shocking the Artist shocks with grace, and with it generates his cypher, challenging our ability to detach ourselves from the contemporary way of absorbing images and interpreting them.