Francesco Pignatelli Biography
Francesco Pignatelli (1971 - ) was born in January 1971 in Milan. In the early 90s he lived and worked in London where he began to use photography in an experimental way. Since 1999, with the Telling Portraits series, he has created sequences aimed at exploring the psychological dimensions of some illustrious characters, including Nagisa Oshima, Wim Wenders, Peter Greenaway, Duane Michals, Takeshi Kitano and Robert Wilson. With these essential black and white images it offers new and original points of view on some great masters of cinema, theater and photography. Connections and references to other art forms such as cinema, sculpture and painting are frequent in Pignatelli's work. Between 1999 and 2008 he created installations in galleries and public spaces in Turin, Milan, Rome, Venice, Cologne, Strasbourg, Bonn, Paris and Toronto. Lives and works in Milan. The Milanese artist, whose work has established itself on an international scale, started with the camera (he also participated in photo-sessions of musical groups later published in Rolling Stones and Esquire) to arrive, passing through - for example - the use of a singular process of prints from the negative, to an unprecedented pictorial dimension. The result was Reversed Renaissance. In this work the artist brings some of the Renaissance masterpieces back to a photographic experience, thus restoring a certain spontaneity to the ancient thanks to an operation of bringing the past up to date. The poetics of his work is in antithesis with the very nature of photography, in fact, while the shot was born as a memory device, Pignatelli uses photography to erase memories. His images are current if not even aimed at the future.
