Artists

Mimmo Jodice

Press release

Vistamare is pleased to present IMMAGINI DEL VUOTO: dalla camera oscura alla camera chiara, an exhibition dedicated to Mimmo Jodice (Naples, 1933–2025), curated by Andrea Viliani in collaboration with the artists Linda Fregni Nagler and Armin Linke, and organised in close collaboration with the Mimmo Jodice Archive. A central figure in contemporary photographic history and research, Jodice has developed an independent yet radically committed practice focused on establishing photography not as an act of representation but as a meditation on reality – a combination of gestures and thoughts, physical and metaphysical elements, space and time. The exhibition – the fourth devoted to the artist at Vistamare, and the first after his passing – is curated by Andrea Viliani together with artists Linda Fregni Nagler and Armin Linke, whose research is, in turn, focused on investigating stories and epistemologies, materialities and (dis)functionalities, compositional structures and expressive dynamics of the language and medium of photography. As a result of their respective archival research, the documents and works on display (some of them have never been shown before) are arranged in an open and interconnected triptych – also distinguished by varying gradients of light – which introduces and reinterprets some of the possible dimensions and enduring aspects of Jodice’s research, allowing visitors to draw their own synthesis. The exhibition moves from the experimental work of the 1960s and 1970s – with their conceptual and social documentary works – to the rarefied photographic imagery of Vedute di Napoli (1980) — with one of its most iconic images on display: an empty advertising billboard against the backdrop of a surreally deserted city – up to a selection from the series Eden (1995) — filling the central gallery and, with its blending of life and death, the animate and the inanimate, banality and violence, the noisy chaos of everyday life and the clear composure of the gaze, revives one of the defining genres of Neapolitan Baroque, that of the still life, presenting itself as a powerful invitation to live, or perhaps to photograph the life around us rather than merely capturing it. The exhibition thus appears as a series of different interpretative perspectives on Jodice’s daily work as a photographer, a shared journey of exploration into what happens at the moment the photograph is taken – in the choice of the subject, the point of view and the lighting conditions – and what re-occurs when the image is printed in the darkroom – when the image takes shape in an almost performative act – until it is shared for the brief duration of the exhibition and the selection entrusted to the long-term preservation of the archive. If taking a photograph means capturing and conveying elements of reality, how can we distinguish them from others, letting them assert themselves on their own, and how can we preserve their original vitality or evoke their lost vitality? How can we overcome the static, two-dimensional nature of a photograph to present it as a mobile and evolving experience, both perceived and performed? How can we transcend reality to photograph not its spatial and transitory aspect, but its enduring meaning over time? By raising these questions, the exhibition engages with Jodice’s images in the recognition that they have always been, despite being seemingly filled with reality, ‘images of emptiness’ (‘immagini del vuoto’), as Jodice himself writes in a letter to an imaginary interlocutor – a letter never sent, but displayed at the centre of the exhibition. It is almost as though Jodice had been waiting for us to become, today, the recipients of his letter; and so we find ourselves observing together that unsettling and paradoxical void – at least considering what a photograph is, what a photographer does, and the very nature of photography itself – which Jodice has persistently sought and photographed throughout his life – a long, patient, waiting spent between the darkroom and the ‘camera lucida' [1] that, for Jodice, could be the photographic enlarger which he experimented with even before having a photographic camera – leaving us, as his legacy, both its elusive presence and its inevitable necessity. [1] Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie, Gallimard, Paris, 1980 (Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Hill & Wang, New York City, 1980).