Melancholy is that feeling, mixed of nostalgia and pain, we experience when thinking of the time passing. This is what I feel when looking at the remains of the ancient Roman and Greek world: a time when Gods were indifferent to mortals, the Christian God had still to come, and only the Man was in all his misery and grandeur.
Ancient sculptures as a medium for a philosophical reflection on beauty, metamorphosis, and the passage of time
Photography enters into relations with different dimensions of time: with the present, in documentary and reportage photography; with the past when photographs are records of personal memories and traces of one’s own life experience and biography. More difficult is to express the relation of photography with the timeless: the absolute, permanent, invariable dimensions of human existence. This is where photography enters into an exploration of symbols, a search for meanings and purpose beyond appearances.
Along this line of research is the series “Melancholy of the Ancient World”, where photographs of ancient sculptures are the medium for a reflection on beauty, metamorphosis, and time in life experience.
The ancient sculptures emerge from darkness, the grazing light revealing surfaces marked by fractures, abrasions, amputations, as signs impressed on the bodies by time seen not as an individual or historical event but as the defining inherent condition of human existence.
The metamorphoses of those ancient relics recall the journey of anyone’s identity. Time reveals the fractures along hidden lines of frailty, and different fragments need to be recomposed to make sense of a life experience.
Human existence is the struggle of unlimited desire in a finite body, an aspiration to perfection that is never attainable. Beauty, that transient and fragile good, is no more than a fraction of time lost at the very moment it is caught. The impulse that sometimes makes us feel similar to gods is inevitably frustrated.
Against the illusions of relative goods, moral perfection is looked for as a way to survive against the injuries of time and fate. For the ancient Romans, the word “vis” meant both the physical and the moral strength; and the purpose of philosophia was to make the scholar’s psyche an inner fortress untouched by the outer world and the common men’s false opinions.
Nevertheless, that mighty sculptor, Time, shapes our body and mind according to a design that is never finished. For our existence is forever metamorphosing and never definitive nor univocal, constantly looking for the lost part of the whole Self.
The provisional conclusion is that the opposites are the same: beauty and decay, male and female, the instant and the eternity, all collapse in one time, one life, one end. For light to exist, shadow is necessary; and when the light fades, shadow slips after it.
Read more about my visual poetic of photography and time on this page.
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