Roccaforte

Eighteen photographic artworks and one installation made of seven multi-sized light-boxes compose Roccaforte, the second Neapolitan solo show of the Sicilian, Siracusa city borned, artist Davide Bramante. Roccaforte is curated by Raffaella Morra and Loredana Troise, organised by the non profit company E-M ARTS, hosted in the beautiful XVII Century rooms of Palazzo Ruffo di Bagnara, home to Fondazione Morra.
After My own Rave (1999), installed in the previous space of Fondazione Morra located in Via Calabritto, Davide Bramante is back in town, Naples, to exhibit: his photos catch the main world towns, from Naples to Turin to Cairo, to Madrid, New York, Beijing, Paris and London.
Davide Bramante: “Just one photo of mine is enough to render back the body of an entire city (…) Many times I told and wrote that my way to portray is the same to my way of thinking, living, dreaming, hoping: all is juxtaposed as an unicum…As artist, I prefer the medium of photography because - due to major force-cause - it is the only one with which I am able to quickly express my ideas (1/250, 1/500 of a second)”.
Each image on show is obtained with an analogical process and juxtaposes more sights of a city, it is a meaningful and powerful sum the artist Bramante designs first mentally, then by shooting more than one fraction of vision of a city on the same film.
A square, a monument, a basaltic weft, the sky and the night, fractals of genius loci, self referenced stories, colours and smells, ethnography: each city, Bramante notes, “ is the place of our vision, such as nature and its cosmos were in the past, cities now are the real imagery of present times because they are made with my images”.
Artworks, realized with the technique of multiple exposition on shooting, are mounted under plexiglass: each one unveils all the meticulous details composing the vision of the artist.
The multi-focal addition of details and places, framed in an ascending climax, makes the exhibition seducing: its reading is a discover following an exegesis and emotional decrypting whose results are unexpected.
With Roccaforte, audience sinks in something seeming natural but is out of the ordinary, as in a complex net to be perceived in its struggling time ambiguity: “…Sometimes I mix these things and do not understand if I am going back or forward the time and the space”, the artist ends.
The show entitles Roccaforte because Bramante likes to accentuate the relation with Naples, a city that always represented a reference and the main creative source in his practice during the years since his first solo show on 1999.
“You cannot think to Davide Bramante’s practice - the curators Raffaella Morra and Loredana Troise add - as a description of nude life. You have to bear it as a representative code, reducing syntax to a series of logic data fully enriched by connotative meanings”.