by Marco Lanza
Tens of thousands of anonymous photographs form a heterogeneous corpus of portraits and snapshots dating from the late nineteenth century to the seventies. This material, lacking the documentary rigor typical of institutional archives, has granted the artist a high degree of freedom, allowing him to intervene in it without the fear of violating its historical memory.
Lanza has carried out a systematic reframing, a surgical and irreversible operation that transforms the vernacular photograph into an autonomous aesthetic object. The work produces a dual outcome: the selected fragment, elevated into a new composition, and the apparent remainder, a visual device which, through the void that fills it, draws narrative strength from its absence and persists as a structurally open work.
In the series of overlays, the investigation then shifts toward material and conceptual stratification. Here, stacks of photographs reveal only the foreground and the outer edges of the underlying images, evoking the impossibility of fully excavating the micro-histories of others.
In Ricreazione, Marco Lanza does not merely recycle abandoned images, but redeems their formal potential, transforming the photographic surface into raw material for a new, unprecedented landscape of the imaginary.
Marco Lanza
Marco Lanza, born in Florence, where he currently lives and works, developed an interest in photography at a very young age, immediately embarking on an artistic research path that would lead him to exhibit both in Italy and internationally. His works have been published in international magazines including “The Sunday Times”, “Le Monde”, “Die Zeit”, “Creative Review”. He is the author of the volumes The Living Dead, Velatura, and Depositi. In 2005, together with his brother Saverio, he founded Pastis, a video art project that combines video, photography, and music.
