In the realm of wildlife photography, few can rival the passion and expertise of Robert Sayialel, a captivating personality who has captured the hearts of fellow enthusiasts and professionals alike. From humble beginnings in the heart of Amboseli National Park, where he first honed his skills capturing the majestic big Tuskers, Robert has traversed the breathtaking landscapes of Kenya’s national parks, documenting once-in-a-lifetime safaris for awe-struck guests. Now, as the resident photographer at the sybaritic Angama lodge, perched on an escarpment high above Kenya’s Maasai Mara, Robert shares his wealth of knowledge and unique perspective with emerging photographers who, like him, find the allure of the untamed wild irresistible. HAP spoke with Sayialel about his expertise, all-time favorite shots, and why African safaris remain the holy grail for every aspiring photographer.
Tell us a bit about your background. How did you get into photography, and how did you land at Angama?
I started my career in the IT department working with the Amboseli Trust for Elephants in Amboseli National Park, close to where I was born and raised. Over time, I started going out on safari drives, documenting and photographing the big, famous Tuskers of Amboseli, which opened a new chapter in wildlife photography. When my time was up in Amboseli, I moved to Nairobi, freelancing with tour companies, traveling with guests through Kenya’s National Parks, and documenting their safaris. When Covid hit and there were no visitors, much of my work turned to portrait photography within the city until I saw an advert that Angama was looking for a photographer to guide and document safaris and wildlife of the Mara Triangle. An opportunity too good to pass, I applied, and it has been an incredible two years now of my life doing what I love in one of the most beautiful wildlife viewing places in the world. The best part about being part of this dear team is that I am not always confined to the studio teaching and editing photos; every now and then, I get to go out and hone my skills even more.
What are some of the experiences that Angama’s photo studio offers and are they unique compared to other luxury safari hotels?
Angama has set itself apart as one of the travel destinations in Kenya, with a few camps now following suit, that has a dedicated Photographic Studio to cater to guests’ photography needs. In the studio, guests have an opportunity to arrange private complimentary photographic tutorials and editing sessions to learn the ins and outs of a camera. This can either be with their own gear or cameras and lenses available for hire in the studio. Alternatively, one can choose to hire a photographer for one-on-one, in-depth practical classes on game drives. For those who prefer to put down their cameras and enjoy their Mara experience to the fullest, we accompany them on drives to capture these wonderful memories on their behalf, both people and wildlife.
As a way to keep engaging our guests, both past and those we expect, about our wildlife, culture, and experiences, Angama runs weekly blogs, and one of them is titled TWAA (This Week At Angama), which highlights our wildlife sightings and stories from the Mara Triangle. We have intimate knowledge of much of the wildlife in the Triangle, which helps in telling stories about them. TWAA is such a hit with so many viewers as we also feature some incredible photos taken by our guests and our guides as well.
We’ve heard that Angama also runs a photography competition open to the public. Can you tell us more about that?
The Greatest Maasai Mara Photographer of the Year competition was launched by the Angama Foundation to reinforce the status of the Maasai Mara National Reserve as one of the best year-round wildlife destinations on the continent. Aimed at the community of Mara-based guides, Greater Mara employees, photographers, and visitors, the competition showcases the incredible images from the Mara while raising funds for boots-on-the-ground conservation initiatives to ensure its sustainability for generations to come.
Each entry includes a donation to one of the competition’s conservation partners active in the Maasai Mara, with more than US$83,000 handed out by the Angama Foundation to the Anne K. Taylor Fund, the Maa Trust, the Mara Elephant Project, the Mara Conservancy, and the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust in 2019. Running from January to October, each month a finalist is selected by a judging panel of acclaimed wildlife photographers and stands a chance of winning the grand prize: a five-night safari for two at Angama Mara and US$10,000 in cash.
Are there any legendary safari photographers that you’ve admired over the years?
Nick Brandt has always been my favorite as one of the pioneers in portraying animals as sentient creatures, not so different from us, showing how deeply our fates are intertwined. Brandt portrays people and animals together, causing us to reflect on the real-life consequences of climate change. In the end, what is a wildlife photographer if there is no wildlife to photograph?
Can you explain what prompted the shift from traditional game hunting to photography safaris? Why this was pivotal to conservation, and the types of experiences offered by safari lodges?
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Africa was a popular destination for European and American big game hunters who traveled to the continent to hunt exotic animals. This was seen as a sport and a means of demonstrating one’s masculinity and courage. However, in the early 20th century, a few pioneering photographers began to challenge these notions by capturing images of African wildlife instead of killing them, creating the idea of “photographic safaris” and safari travel as we know it today—a pivotal change to shooting with a camera instead of shooting with a gun.
And finally, if you could pick one or two of your very favorite photos, which are they and why? If the animal has a name and story, please share!
In the two years with Angama in the Maasai Mara, I have photographed many incredible photos, but one that sets all my photos apart is when I witnessed a zebra earning its stripes even in the face of death. During the migration season, a dazzle of zebras was crossing the Mara River from the greater reserve towards the Triangle at one of the highly crocodile-infested crossing points. We spent hours on the river’s edge waiting to witness this extremely world-popular animal migration river crossing. Eventually, the urge to cross became too much, and the animals had to cross despite the imminent danger awaiting in the river. Almost immediately, more than a dozen crocodiles swung into action, grabbing a few zebras here and there. There was chaos and blood flowing in the river, which gave the rest of the zebras an easier pass while the crocodiles fought for a piece from those that succumbed, or so it seemed. A lone croc away from the melee managed to grab a zebra by its leg followed by a death roll, rendering it immobile, hence the ensuing fight for survival. Zebras are revered for their kicks and bite. The zebra was able to fend off the single croc by giving it a good bite, but only for a while. The damage already done, the poor zebra was a sitting duck, and eventually, more Crocs descended on it. It’s the circle of life.
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Bucknell’s downtown Samek Art Gallery is presenting the exhibit “What You Think You Know” from March 14 to June 4.
The title of the exhibit is a nod to stereotypes surrounding Native Americans, and the art within the exhibit works to dismantle them. The exhibit was curated by Museum Fellow Sarah N. Hixson, Mass. and Sierra Nizhonii (Diné). It contains art from Cara Romero, Cannupa Hanska Luger and the 1491s. All artists’ plaques also contain their Native names.
Above the gallery’s permanent fireplace is the title of the exhibit and a brief commentary on why this exhibition was curated and its relevance. It explains the recognizable names of Pennsylvania locations–Shamokin, Susquehanna, Pocono, etc.–come from the Algonquin language family spoken by Indigenous people. These names belonged to Native tribes and still do to this day.
The wall reads: “To reduce a culture or group of people to consumable and profitable products is commodification; obsessing over singular elements of someone’s identity transforms fascination into fetishization.”
To the left of the wall, Luger’s art is displayed. Luger was born on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota and is a Bucknell graduate. A glass display case contains “artifacts”: ceramic pieces, some made to look like broken bottles. Above the display case is the word “artifact” in dictionary entry style. In contrast with their definitions, the words are used in example sentences that act as commentary on Indigenous artifacts being kept in institutional collections.
One line reads: “Institutional control of narrative has produced several technical artifacts in relation to Indigenous people.” Luger’s work continues to the left, with brightly-painted arrows and more commentary on the Indigenous property that has been deemed as artifacts.
On the adjacent wall hangs Romero’s works from her “First American Girl” series. Two large, bright, archival pigment photographs show two native women, one entitled Julia and the other Naomi. Each stands within a black-and-white patterned outline, imitating a doll in a box. They are dressed in traditionally Native clothing, and surrounded by culturally important “accessories.”
Romero’s pieces work to combat the commercialized image of Indigenous women, such as through the marketable dolls that these images imitate.
Perpendicular to her exhibit is the standard land acknowledgement that Bucknell uses in academic contexts and at events.
In a room towards the back of the exhibit, a television plays works from the 1491s, a sketch comedy troupe composed of five Native men: Migzi Pensoneau, Bobby Wilson, Dallas Goldtooth, Ryan RedCorn and Sterlin Harjo. The group began in 2009 on YouTube, but after going viral have grown to performing sold-out shows, giving TEDxTalks and being a part of major projects such as FX’s Reservation Dogs. Their humor and satire helps to combat Native stereotypes in a more lighthearted way, but also in a way that is more digestible and accessible to the general public.
“I really appreciated Chase Gregory bringing our class to the Samek downtown on Wednesday afternoon, otherwise I would not have gotten a chance to see such a wonderful exhibit,” Isabelle Levesque-Du Bose ’23 said. “Overall, I really enjoyed the exhibition at the Samek downtown and encourage everybody to learn more about indigenous communities, not only near us, but across the country.”
The exhibit will be open until June 4 during the gallery’s operating hours of 12–5 p.m. on Tuesdays through Sundays. It is free and open to the public, located on Market St. across from the Campus Theatre.
(Visited 2 times, 2 visits today)
Hannah Shaw, a kitten educator and advocate, and Andrew Marttila, a feline photographer, are a “meow” made in heaven.
Over the past decade, Hannah René Shaw has become a prominent educator on and advocate for kittens nationally and globally. She’s known as the “Kitten Lady,” and her 1.2 million Instagram followers look to her for advice on things like what to do if you find a stray cat, or how to get a baby kitten to eat.
But they also follow her for the barrage of high-quality kitten photos featured on her account, some of them shot by Andrew Jared Marttila, who is known as the “Cat Photographer.” The love in the photographs is palpable — after all, this is a story of how the kitten lady and the cat photographer fell in love.
Back in 2016, Ms. Shaw, who has a bachelor’s degree in psychology from George Mason University, wasn’t looking for a partner. “I was 28, and I was very much not interested in getting into a committed relationship at that moment in life,” she said.
She was getting her nonprofit organization Orphan Kitten Club off the ground and working professionally with cat rescue organizations, helping them create programs dedicated to the most vulnerable cats: orphaned neonatal kittens, known as “bottle babies,” because without a mother, they must rely on being fed by a bottle to survive.
Someone she met through her work suggested that she follow a photographer on Instagram called @iamthecatphotographer, who, yes, specialized in photographing cats. Ms. Shaw was intrigued. “I was like, that sounds weird — how can someone be a professional cat photographer?” She forgot about the suggestion until, thanks to their overlapping worlds, the cat photographer showed up on her Instagram feed anyway.
“There was a photo on his page of him in an ugly Christmas sweater with his cat in a Santa hat, posed like a cheesy 1980s Sears family portrait,” she recalled. “It made me laugh so hard, and also I was like, wait, this guy is really cute.”
Mr. Marttila, 37, was living in Philadelphia; Ms. Shaw, 35, was in Washington. She sent him a message, asking if he would be willing to come to Washington to take photos of some of her foster kittens. She offered him lodging in her guest room.
“At the time I would have said it was just professional,” Ms. Shaw said.
“… But I knew what it was,” added Mr. Marttila.
On April 2, 2016, they met in Washington for dinner at Busboys and Poets. Ms. Shaw figured at best there might be a fling: She didn’t have time for much else, and had a date with someone else planned for the following weekend. “I thought, OK, this is a cool guy to know,” she said. “We’ll take some photos, maybe we’ll make out, then he’ll go home and I’ll go on my date next weekend.”
Instead, they connected over their obvious love of animals, but also on issues that had nothing to do with kittens. Ms. Shaw was impressed by what she describes as Mr. Marttila’s “serious depth.”
“It was something I understood right away and now I have seven years of evidence,” she said. “He is a self-reflective person who has done a lot of work to grow and become this stable, introspective person who is a really good partner.”
They couldn’t stop talking, so Mr. Marttila stayed the weekend. He said he wished she didn’t have a date planned for the following weekend, because he wanted to invite her to an event he thought she would be the perfect plus-one for: a red-carpet movie premiere for Jordan Peele’s comedy film “Keanu,” about a kitten kidnapped by gangsters. Some live, adoptable cats would be walking the red carpet with gold chains on, and Mr. Marttila had been hired to shoot the scene.
Ms. Shaw wondered aloud if she should cancel her date so that she could attend, and settled on flipping a coin in order to decide. The coin said to cancel, and so for their second date, they met Mr. Peele.
Mr. Marttila had found his way to feline photography almost accidentally. In 2011, while pursuing a bachelor’s degree in neuroscience at Temple University, he started taking photos of his new cat and posting them on Instagram. As the number of people liking his photos increased, he expanded to photographing other pets to supplement his income.
“When I graduated I said, ‘OK, I am going to try to do this for a year, and if I am broke then I will go to grad school,’” Mr. Marttila said. Instead, in 2015, he landed his first book deal, for “Shop Cats of New York.” He met Ms. Shaw a few months before the book published by Harper Design.
The two quickly found synergy in their love for cats and began inspiring each other’s work. “When I met Andrew I was thinking I wish I could just focus on writing a book about kitten welfare, and then Andrew had a book coming out and it was so cool to see another young person really doing these things,” Ms. Shaw said. “I was looking at getting another job, but Andrew was the one who said to me, ‘Just try for three months.’”
She said having someone believe in her enough to say “just try” shifted her perspective. “I already had this passion for something that there was no job for, and so that made me go and create it myself.” Mr. Marttila said that Ms. Shaw renewed his passion for animals as well, and that her hustle inspired him to amp up his own work ethic. They say they are each other’s “hype person.”
After 10 months of dating long-distance, Ms. Shaw told Mr. Marttila that if he wanted their relationship to continue, he would have to move to Washington. “So I rented a U-Haul on Valentine’s Day 2017 and moved in,” Mr. Marttila said.
“Andrew told me when we met that his dream was to be a stay-at-home cat dad,” Ms. Shaw said. “And I was like, I have a lot of dreams in life, so I think I can make that happen.”
After about a year and a half of living together, they realized that with both of them working from home, three pet cats between them, and a room dedicated to foster kittens, they had outgrown their space. “We were like, where do you live when you can live anywhere?” And in August 2018, they started over in San Diego.
On a trip to Thailand in February 2019, after kayaking out to an uninhabited island, Mr. Marttila proposed to Ms. Shaw. “Even from that first date, I knew that I had met someone that shared the same paradigm that I did,” Mr. Marttila said.
Both live an alcohol-free, vegan, animal-friendly lifestyle, so when it came time to plan a wedding, those values became guiding philosophies for the event. They chose a friend’s animal sanctuary as the setting, because it’s a place where animals get to live their best lives. “I think it’s a significant space,” Ms. Shaw said, “because it’s about how amazing it is when you give someone the promise of sanctuary — and shouldn’t a relationship be like that?’
Ms. Shaw and Mr. Marttila were wed April 2 at Farm Animal Refuge in Campo, Calif. Their friend and veterinarian, Dr. Rachel Wallach, who was ordained for the occasion by the American Marriage Ministries, officiated, and the internationally renowned harpist Mary Lattimore played a version of the Cure’s “Friday I’m in Love” during the processional.
Afterward, 100 guests enjoyed a mocktail bar and an all-vegan meal of crispy squash blossoms, braised tempeh, beet chicharron and saffron cavatelli. Guests were then invited to take their edible vegetable basket centerpieces of zucchini, tomatoes and kale and feed them to the farm’s animals.
As a special surprise, Ms. Shaw presented Mr. Marttila with a basket of calico kittens — their new foster pets. As he cradled the tiny babies, Ms. Shaw leaned in to hug him. Mr. Marttila’s eyes welled up as he said, “This is a dream come true.”
When April 2, 2023
Where Farm Animal Refuge, Campo, Calif.
An Unusual Ring Bearer The ring was carried down the aisle by Hugo, a pig that Mr. Marttila and Ms. Shaw rescued as an emaciated newborn from behind a taco stand in Los Angeles. Hugo looked dapper in a white collar with a black bow tie. To motivate him down the aisle, popcorn, his favorite treat, was dropped by the flower girl.
A Watermelon Toss In lieu of a bouquet toss, the couple chose to throw a watermelon together over the fence and into the pig corral. The melon landed with a crash on the ground — the trigger sound that sends happy pigs racing for a bite of the juicy snack. There was more than enough snacks to go around, as the couple had set up an imitation farm stand of vegetables and fruit that guests could offer the animals as well.
Woolly Wedding Crasher In organizing the layout of the wedding, the couple arranged for one part of the space — where the human food and drinks were served — to be left inaccessible to animals. A large sheep named Joey didn’t get that memo. He managed to crash the wedding, skirting by barriers and breaking into a frolic through the off-limits zone. As the bride, groom and guests tried to corral the sheep, they were outsmarted: he snatched a flower arrangement from one of the tables and proudly took off.
My name is Cham Phan. I got into photography when I took a film photography class in high school in 2006. Have been in love ever since. I lost my vision shooting fashion, and when I recovered, this was the only way I could continue to use a camera safely.I have been shooting for 15 years. In my first ten years, I was focused on fashion photography, but after going blind during a shoot when my blood vessels ruptured due to undiagnosed diabetes, I had to make a change.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been slightly edited for clarity when reading.
I switched to infrared landscapes after hanging up the camera for a couple years. The fact that IR works when the sun is directly overhead was the one key difference in the process that made it so I could safely shoot again. Shooting golden hour is incredibly difficult with how damaged my eyes are.
My identity has changed dramatically during my journey. I used to rely on a team and models, talent, and designers to create an image. In the fashion world, you are expected to move a million miles a minute, and that was not sustainable. Since switching gears to landscape, Photography has become a meditative slow-paced form of therapy. I would lean towards being a creator than a documenter due to the nature of my landscapes being surreal.
I always look for intersections of nature and man-made. My end frame guides every decision. I look for lines that tell a story. I like to frame my subjects almost uncomfortably and always shot as low as possible for a larger feel. The most peaceful aspect of the process is lining up the frame then waiting for the clouds to land exactly where they need to be. It’s a waiting game and requires patience and focus. If I can shoot next to a body of water, even better.
It’s therapy for me. Photography is my way to get in touch with nature and exist outside of time in a tranquil state.
Since my photos are all digital, I do false color processing to push the colors to fit the mood that I am in. This is my set of photos from my recent trip to Cozumel. I hope to do more shoots for Tourism boards and hotel/resort groups.
Annie Leibovitz was one of my biggest influences. Listening to her talk about her 1 on 1 process to get people to open up for portraits really helped me evolve as a director. Photography allows me to show the world how I would like to see it.
For Infrared photography, I use a Fujifilm XT3 with 3 lenses: 23mm f2, 50mm f2 and 35mm f1.4
I also shoot with the GFX 100 system using the GF 45mm and GF 63mm.
For my street photography work, I shoot with a Leica M240 and a TTartisans 35mm f1.4. Both natural light and artificial light are used by me, because all light can be beautiful.
Check out more from Cham at his website. Want to be featured too? Here’s how to get on our site.
Welcome to the Art Angle, a podcast from Artnet News that delves into the places where the art w orld meets the real world, bringing each week’s biggest story down to earth. Join us every week for an in-depth look at what matters most in museums, the art market, and much more, with input from our own writers and editors, as well as artists, curators, and other top experts in the field.
When you hear the name Roy Lichtenstein, an artistic style immediately comes to mind. In the early 1960s, Lichtenstein’s use of comic books as an inspiration for his brightly-colored Pop Art painting was groundbreaking, and even shocking.
Today, he is one of the most instantly-recognizable and widely known of all painters, and yet a quarter of a century after his death, the subject of Roy Lichtenstein’s source material has unexpectedly become a hot topic once again.
In the 1960s, Lichtenstein’s paintings sold for thousands of dollars; in 1995, just a few years before he died, his painting Nurse sold at auction for $1.7 million, and then in 2015 the same painting hit the auction block once again, this time selling for a staggering $95 million, making it one of the most expensive paintings in the world.
While marketing that sale, Christie’s auction house said that the imagery in Nurse was drawn from what it called a “comic romance novel” of the early 1960s. What the auction house did not mention was the actual person who drew the original panel Lichtenstein used as source material for that painting was the golden age comic Arthur Petty, and in the world of comic art, this lack of respect for Lichtenstein’s sources is a big, big deal.
In museums, the artist’s status may be unquestionable, but crossover into the parallel universe of comic art and Lichtenstein’s status is viewed as a symbol of the disrespect to comics as an art form, and the man himself is seen as a thief who copied hard-working artists without even bothering to credit them by name.
Instead of healing over time, this particular rift seems to have only become more inflamed as Lichtenstein’s stock has soared. Some of the most famous voices in comics from Dave Gibbons, the artist behind the groundbreaking graphic novel Watchmen to Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of Maus, to Neil Gaiman, writer of the legendary comic series The Sandman have all been outspoken, blasting museums for failing to credit the unique voices of the comic book artists who inspired Roy Lichtenstein.
The story of the many meanings of Roy Lichtenstein is a story of the shifting relations between museum art and comic culture, of money, morality, and the law; and of how meaning in art is always shifting. At least, that’s one takeaway from the new streaming documentary WHAAM! BLAM! Roy Lichtenstein and the Art of Appropriation. This week, national art critic Ben Davis spoke to the film’s director James L. Hussey to discuss the issues it raised.
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Six decades of traveling the continents, covering crises, portraying cities… From his native Germany to his adoptive America, Magnum’s photoreporter has witnessed the societal changes of the last century that have turned our contemporary world upside down.
With the one and only instruction to “take a look”, Thomas Hoepker was commissioned in 1963 to produce a series of reports across the Atlantic for the magazine Kristall. The young photographer, accompanied by the German journalist Rolf Winter, traveled for three months, from New York to San Francisco, the country revealed itself under his lens as the road trip progressed. It took several weeks and a few thousand shots, contrasting with the idea of prosperity conveyed by American culture and which captivated so much in a Germany weakened by the war. The duo bore witness to another face of the United States in the sixties, the other side of the coin waltzing between dream and disappointment, wealth and poverty, piety and morality.
Far from the American Dream, Hoepker’s images highlighted significant disparities between social castes and between territories. This Korean War veteran, with both legs amputated, begging in the streets of Quincy in Illinois, or this man slumped at the foot of a garbage can on a sidewalk in New York in manifest indifference… The clichés of distress and injustice sit side by side with those of a religious and bourgeois class for whom reality hovers above that of the masses. A contrast that Hoepker’s photographs underline with a fine irony embodied by this sad clown who stood out among the uniformed customers in a fast food restaurant in Reno, Nevada, with, above his head, the simple words to the tunes of sentence: “Turkey Dinner”. Equally distant from urban appeal, Hoepker captured a hinterland where time seemed, on the contrary, to have stood still: the hermit in his cabin in the depths of Montana or the Fleetwood car in the almost desert countryside around the city of Waelder in Texas, that thwarted an American image on glossy paper.
If Hoepker’s photographs sound like a disillusion, this stay inaugurated his “je-ne-sais-quoi” for this equivocal country whose cultural and political life l became his future favorite subjects. He returned there with Winter in 1970, this time for the magazine Stern, and in 1976, Hoepker became a correspondent in New York where he still lives today, at the age of 86. Driven by this desire to understand the American people who fascinate him, he started a new tour of the country in 2020 from which are born color images presented in response to his black and white archives in his latest book with a social documentary content: The Way It Was – Road Trips USA.
“Travelling is seeing and discovering images”
Famine and leprosy in Ethiopia, repression in Santo Domingo, the smallpox epidemic in India… At the same time, Hoepker traveled the planet to talk about the striking crises with rigorous images, away from any sensationalism. Thoughtful compositions that appear as the testimony of the passage from one world to another, some of which, several decades later, still mark the consciences. Many of Hoepker’s images have become mythical, such as the Love-birds in Rome produced in 1956, resulting from his first monochrome works. Hoepker makes a point of photographing his subjects without compromising who they are: to get to know them. You have to understand a lot of things, and that’s when you see differently.”
In 1974, the photoreporter accompanied his wife, the journalist Eva Windmöller – also working for Stern, and then became one of the rare photographers in the West to obtain accreditation to go “to the other side”. Together, they documented daily life from their East Berlin neighborhood, located in the diplomatic square. Hoepker captured in color this “grey” Germany where only communist red came through: a crowd of soldiers in forest green uniforms contrasting with the red flags during a military rally in Treptower, the scarlet Skoda matching the socks under the leather sandals of this vacationer in Rügen, all resonating with the red facade, again, of the Plattenbauten building in Halle-Neustadt… Hoepker creates images whose suggestive value takes on symbolic power. A way of telling the great historical cases of another spectrum, with an ability to grasp their intimacy: these young people who take a break together during a military air show in Magdeburg fix History forever.
Noémie de Bellaigue
“Thomas Hoepker: Intimate History”, until May 7, 2023.
f³ – freiraum für fotografie
Waldemarstraße 17,
10179 Berlin
https://fhochdrei.org/
From April 15th to June 3rd, 2023, Galerie XII Paris presents the first personal exhibition in a while in Paris of the Milanese artist Paolo Ventura. Inspired by the story Le Passe-Muraille (The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls) by Marcel Aymé, this new exhibition combining painting, models and photography, immerses us in the Paris of the 1940s.
Paolo Ventura is a multidisciplinary artist who has used different techniques (photography, collages, painting, sculpture, drawing, scenography) to create two- and three-dimensional works for more than twenty years. Built around images of “invented worlds” or “unrealities” in which the story unfolds like a dream, between imagination and memory, his deeply original work is shot through with a disturbing feeling of timelessness.
If War Souvenir (USA, 2005) evoked the atmosphere of the Second World War in the form of clay puppets and painted cardboard decorations, here he embodies himself, with a few members of his family in costumes and made up, the characters from his Short Stories, posing in front of decorations painted by his hands. All his work remains inhabited by the notions of double, mise-en-scène and illusion.
For his first exhibition at the Gallery, Paolo Ventura has imagined an original project combining various mediums and freely inspired by Marcel Aymé’s short story, The Man Who Could Walk Through Walls, which is the story of a completely ordinary man, but endowed with the extraordinary gift of being able to pass through walls, takes place in Montmartre in the Paris of the 1940s. This “Passe-Muraille” then embarks on many adventures until the day he loses his gift, thus finding himself forever prisoner of a wall . Paolo Ventura uses this tale as a pretext to reconstruct scenes of Parisian life, a romantic and violent story that spans the ages, in the form of transversal works including drawings, photographs, paintings, models and paper sculptures.
About Paolo Ventura
Son of an illustrator, the childhood of Paolo Ventura (born in 1968 in Milan) was rocked by the sketches and stories of his father. The wonder and the childlike passion still permeate his work of narrative staging where we regularly find images of street artists, theaters and cinemas, which are not without evoking certain compositions of paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec. Paolo Ventura’s scenes are tinged with nostalgia, but have an element from the realm of the strange or the fantastic that echoes his childhood: an overflowing imagination for those who think that the real world always seems a little too grey.
After studying painting in Milan, Ventura devoted himself to photography and settled in New York where he collaborates with fashion magazines, bringing from this time a very personal look to this formatted medium. At the same time, he began to work on personal projects which led to a first commission from the War Museum in Washington. War Souvenir marks the launch of Paolo Ventura’s artistic career with exhibitions in the main capitals, from Moscow to Milan, from Paris to New York. Since then, he has benefited from about thirty personal exhibitions in institutions and galleries, and participated in as many collective exhibitions.
In 2020, on the occasion of a major retrospective at the Centro Italiano per la Fotografia in Turin, the Silvana editions published a catalog raisonné of his work.
About Gallery XII Paris
Galerie XII Paris, formerly Galerie Photo12 founded in 2007 by Valérie-Anne Giscard d’Estaing specializes in contemporary figurative photography.
Member of the Professional Committee of Art Galleries, the Gallery strives to promote artists with a strong pictorialist sensibility, working on new forms of media with a multidisciplinary approach, particularly at the borders with painting, sculpture and collages.
Galerie XII Paris organizes exhibitions within its walls, contributes to the distribution of works through the organization of exhibitions with partner institutions and galleries through its “Hors Les Murs” program and participates in international fairs such as Paris Photo, Photo London, Photo Basel, Art Paris Art Fair, Photo Shanghai, Photo L.A and Modern Art Fair. The Gallery has also expanded internationally with the opening of a new space in the United States in 2018.
Paolo Ventura : Le Passe-Muraille
Exhibition from April 15 to June 3, 2023
Opening on Saturday April 15, in the presence of the artist from 3 p.m. to 6 p.m.
Galerie XII Paris
14 rue des Jardins Saint-Paul 75004 Paris
Hours of operation :
Tuesday-Friday: 2 p.m.-7 p.m. Saturday: 12 p.m.-7 p.m & by appointment outside these hours
www.galeriexii.com
