Paolo Novelli, Day n. 3, 2017-2018

This month we had the chance to speak with Paolo Novelli, an Italian artist whose work is embedded in the use of analog photography. His latest exhibition, The Day After Night is now on view at Camera – Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in Turin until July 21st. Paolo Novelli’s use of photography has its roots in a conscious and specific use of black and white film and dark room printing, and talks about human solitude and incommunicability. His subjects are objects or environments that reflect this human condition, walled windows, dark tunnels, streets covered with fog, statues consumed by the action of time. He defines his work technically as a series of conscious mistakes; for his two series about the windows and the cemeteries for example he used some of these errors, such as the perspective, the light and the closeness to his subjects to reach his goals of a deeper communication with the other. It’s technically wrong but the results are far more interesting and speak to people’s hearts. He focuses on what his viewers see in his works, in a constant dialog with humanity, history of art and photography as a medium. An ancient soul in contemporary times, Novelli reminds us with his work that history of art has many lessons to teach us, that – as artists and humans – we should never forget.

Paolo Novelli, Portrait n.24, 2002

Paolo Novelli, Never Beyond n.2, 2006

Paolo Novelli, Night Untitled n.8, 2004

Paolo Novelli, Day n. 1, 2017-2018

BEATRICE SACCO: All your practice is based on many different pillars – using black and white analog photography being among them – with such an ability that makes the pictures deep and alive. Can you explain to us where your choice comes from and what inspired you to continue to apply it throughout your entire career? I am thinking about several of your series, and in particular “Vita Brevis, Ars Longa,” where you explained you caught the shades, created by the consumption of time, in the act of giving new life to the statues of many Italian cemeteries. Can you tell us a bit more about this project?

PAOLO NOVELLI: I think I had the fortune of living through the big finale of the seductive adventure of analog photography in the 20th century. I actually began my ride at the end of the 1990s, immediately chased by a rookie and bold digital photography, that still allowed though some citizenship to the poetry and the motives of the historical film labs; the ones, to be clear, that dressed the extraordinary photo-cinematic identity of the 1950s; from there on, it was really hard for me to give up the flavors of the printer’s garden of the past in favor of the sophisticated flavors of supermarket products (plotters). With Vita Brevis, Ars Longa, these pillars, which could have ended up nowhere, allowed me to build a personal point of view I presume, the only premise for making Art: which makes my prologue secondary, if you consider Art, tout court. Without evading the question, I have to emphasize, in that project, the tonal range of b/w film, amplified by a patient and unorthodox use of natural light (freehand shots done almost in the dark), made it clear to me that, in my specific case, form needed to become substance. The reading of the image and of its complexity needed to be the stage where I would invite the viewer to verify if I had touched his/her truest states of mind, the one that make us all the same. On that stage, during the years, I chose and brought up all my protagonists: objects or environments (doors, tunnels, windows, fog) which were witnesses to the feeling of things, thus of man. I gave them the burden to convey or not to convey; a precise lateral step to detach myself immediately from the poison of self-referentiality. The one that today in Art, as in society, has really worn everyone out; after all, of Francesca Woodman there was only one, and we all know how that went.

Paolo Novelli, Portrait n.22, 2002

Paolo Novelli, Study n. 10, 2012

Paolo Novelli, Night Untitled n.26, 2004

Paolo Novelli, Study n. 19, 2012

BS: You always say that all your art shares another starting point, a research on incommunicability. Still, it seems to me that all your pieces share a layer of tenderness, of a common solitude, even disarmed in a way. Do you see this as well? Do you connect it to your self-given definition of being an outsider artist?

PN: You see, among the others, Maria Callas reminded us that a real Artist cannot be happy; trying to uncover, without reservation, something so terribly unsolved as human nature is, can only lead to this, among other things. I believe that the shared tenderness and solitude that come with it are self defense mechanisms to stand up to this unsought challenge, aspects that, if not complacent or calculated, really bring you into spaces where you are certainly not alone. Being an outsider for me means knowing that authentic Art is non-functional for anything, least of all for the market. All the limits of a research based on reaching out to others, in the short moments when we step out of our impregnable microcosms, I call that incommunicability.

BS: Talking about the diptych exhibited at Camera on view through July 21, Night is not Enough and Day is not Enough, you said that, through the series was conceived and produced before the Covid pandemic, they became emblematic of the feelings of solitude and closure lived in those times. How did you notice this switch of reception in the fruition of the series after such an impactful event as the pandemic we went through?

PN: The trail of the crash of the current human affairs was already apparent for many years, the pandemic was just the most participated one. Over time, along with others (not too many), I took it upon myself to highlight it with my demodé tools. In fact, I don’t really know what people think of my photographs today. In the end, almost everyone wants to cancel this ferocious warning of the explosive divine design, waiting to start back again somewhere else in the universe thanks to the human genius which will be forced at that point to come up with something less miserable than profiling data. So I limited myself to a bitter observation: that I had built, in the last twenty years, an oeuvre made of absorbed people, along streets that lead to tunnels with no apparent way out, between streets made of locked and walled doors and windows, close to deserted cemeteries, immersed in northern existential mists – the scenarios of those two years.

Paolo Novelli, Night Untitled n.2, 2004

Paolo Novelli, Never Beyond n.1, 2006

Paolo Novelli, Portrait n.11, 2002

Paolo Novelli, Day n. 2, 2017-2018

BS: Your pictures make me think about a very precise type of italian landscape, and you said before that you could not take your pictures elsewhere in the world. They remind me a bit of hidden details inside De Chirico’s paintings in a sense, but also of some cinematic scenes like the ones with the fog in Lost Highway by David Lynch. What were your sources of inspiration?

PN: My nature as a man of plains and rivers (everything flows), deprived, aside from the irony of a Ghirri and of the peasant wisdom of an Olmi, but adherent to that sort of quiet bourgeois desperation of Michelangelo Antonioni, has permeated my approach to the world. As for the rest, the early Orson Welles and the subtle morbidity of Alfred Hitchcock took care of that.

BS: You also said you use a very specific camera lens, which allows a precise distance from your subjects, a very human one. Where does this choice come from? Might it be connected to another human struggle, the inability to see beyond a personal point of view?

PN: When you search for common ground with others, to look at the world inside and outside of yourself, using a lens (50mm) that returns the point of view of the human eye seems fundamental.

Paolo Novelli, Day n. 4, 2017-2018

Paolo Novelli, Portrait n.7, 2002

Paolo Novelli, Never Beyond n.4, 2006

Paolo Novelli, Study n. 2, 2011

BS: Speaking about The Night is not Enough and The Day is not Enough you commented “When things are bad, someone at the end of the day tries to cheer you up with sentences like “Sleep on it, tomorrow it will get better.” But you wake up and nothing has changed. Sometimes the only thing that stays is the galloping desire to run away, which almost never gets fulfilled. From this comes the second part of the diptych, The day is not Enough, which has a hypothetic subtitle “to run away.” Can you tell us a bit more about this multifaceted and rather common feeling connected to the two series?

PN: I would do a disservice in an effort to put into findings an effective link between image, content, and the title of the two series; my pictures don’t appreciate me adding anything else at this point, I’m sorry…

BS: You said you create new projects only when you feel you have something to say, contrary to much of the contemporary practices in the arts which seem to require constant attention. Are you working on something new now that you can tell us about? What do you focus on when you don’t work on your projects?

PN: My new project, my new series, is finished; It has a title and the approval of my gallerist Massimo Minini, and now also of Walter Guadagnini it seems. I couldn’t have asked for more. The rest of the time I am busy fighting the nefarious museum proliferation of generic Contemporary Photography, i.e., lacking an identity; basically to demonstrate that I have not understood any lessons of our time.

Paolo Novelli / An Interview
By Beatrice Sacco
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