ARTIST STATEMENT

My works are realized through the techniques of photography, video and performance and are influenced by the experiments on multi-disciplinary mutual relations between images and texts or sound. At the beginning, a few years ago, I did performances involving passers who accidentally I met on the street. The performances were inspired by my poems and I then transposed in photographic works. Then, I was a tireless traveler: the different pace of each city is a necessary influence in my projects.

Many photographic works produced in studio appear not yet completed, like an interruption of the process of composition and you could develop it further by adding or subtracting elements. The film surface becomes a field on which to test the visual perception of reality. Every art work starts from a real image, a photograph, which depicts an experience of life recognizable to all, of which I change its appearance by adding or subtracting elements. It is not used an usual and premeditated procedure: the removal of various images and various films allows the mutation of the visual. The progress is through the intuition and that's all on which I concentrate my work prevailing the aesthetic side that achieves an abstract look, rather than a figurative, descriptive one. The result is a general pictorial sense, even if it is a photographic composition; hence, the sense of ambiguity is met in each piece, as well as the suspicion that it is unfinished. One hesitates in front of the surfaces on which I'm materially intervened as well, because it is shown a conflict with the space of the painting through a labor of corruption of the paper on which the image is printed. Different overlapped and mixed levels, because of the scratches or foldings, do not allow the observer to linger on a line, a shape, a shade. The elements come into conflict with each other for an emotional upset and anxious that I live at the moment of composition. Although each work is preceded by studies and reflections, the time of execution is frequently short, sudden: it is the time when my imaginary of indefiniteness and uncertainty about the real crosses the material, the physical.

To have a dialogue with reality and my imagined worlds, I use mainly photographs found on the streets or into abandoned buildings that I visit. I use, therefore, the testimony of the life of someone else for leading a metamorphosis. However, I do not consider as exclusive the opportunity to translate a real scene into something foreign, but regarding all of us; it is the difficulty in communicating that makes my point of view as unique: the sense of alienation that inspires my work is the evidence of how man is not in a position to express oneself freely. In this condition, thus, there are several distinct steps of my work that emphasize the possibility of conflict: the accidental discovery of the images, the meticulous and accurate intervention on the image, its replication in digital for printing, a further dismantling of the print material punctuated by an instinctual rendering that paradoxically drives to an unexpected result open to the randomness. This work proposes a dialogue between the analog technologies, digital technologies and manual intervention namely the role that today hold the technology and information through the comparison between mechanical and digital automation and, therefore, between the individual and impulsive expression.

Rather a procedure to report the world, for me, photography is a mental practice, poetic, perhaps spiritual, generated as a way to remove the visual signs that I meet and, thus, invent new ones: a new world, in which more realities continuously are overlapped, dismantled and bonded. In my projects, I study and stage the entire history of photography, from the experiments with outdated components to the artistic creativity of a century ago, until the mixture with painting. By experiencing the full range of possibilities and photographic techniques, I turn the visual language using new signs loaded with sensibility and symbols. I am interested, then, to the photograph as an object and not as a medium, finally about its formal possibilities rather than descriptive or related to chronicles. I conceive my work as series to foster a relation between each image: each piece, in a series, has the same title that indicates a single path that is developed in distinct projects in touch. To create a new language, I try to insert what I convince myself to see in dreams and visions, motivated by the certainty that everyone shares a common understanding from which come the archetypes and myths.

The confusion of my work is so organized to suggest a kind of power inside the individual and which can present in such a slow accumulation of found images and merging them on multiple layers. Each work can be considered as evidence of an action, a progress or an "overflow" of the inner and the outer world.

Enzo Comin

BIOGRAPHY

Born in 1979 in Pordenone, Italy; of no fixed abode (nearby Venice, London and France).

Enzo Comin is a multifaceted artist. While attending courses of aesthetics, painting and photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna from 1999 to 2003, he also frequented the school of cinematographic direction and video production at the National Academy of Cinema of the city, then took writing, acting theatre and lyric singing courses. As a result of his broad interest for the different fields of art, his activity relies on photography, as well as on installation and performance, and is influenced by the multi-disciplinary relations between images and texts or sound. Exploiting the technical, theoretical and philosophical dichotomy between analogue and digital photography, and rethinking, questioning the role of photography today, Enzo Comin turns mainly to analogue technology to express himself.

He started his professional career as visual artist in 2008 taking part in a lot of exhibitions and workshops. Today, his artistic search focuses on painting photography using old films and old cameras, (or cameras modified by himself), as a visionary project combining the genres of photography and poetry, put in a concrete form through exhibitions in the following galleries: Spazio Bavacqua Panigai in Treviso, Lipanjepuntin in Trieste, Wäscherei in Zürich, A+A in Venice and DA.CO. in Terni (that invited him for a residency in 2011). In 2012 he was artist in residence at ACSL in Yerevan (Armenia) funded by the Italian Ministry of Culture and GAI (Giovani Artisti Italiani) supporting Italian young artists. He also was artist in residence at Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation, Venice (one year) and at INDEX, Zürich (two months). He took part in the residence/workshop by Mario Airò, Stefano Dugnani and Diego Perrone "Penso con le mie ginocchia" at Spinola Banna per l'Arte, Torino.

For the form of his project “KRIPTOSCOPIA”, he took part in the project "The Exchange Archive" at MoMA in New York in June of 2013 and “Estman project” at the Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen, Switzerland.