About Black Sonata for Vivaldi
Influences and Iconographies
Black Sonata for Vivaldi evokes Dalí's dreamlike quality, where eyes, symbols of distorted perception, connect the body to the unconscious. Man Ray, with his combination of natural elements like flowers and fruit, explores the symbiosis between nature and the body, a theme that also resonates in Francesca Woodman’s work, where the body becomes an expressive tool to explore intimacy and vulnerability. Irving Penn's approach, with his high-contrast black and white photography, emphasizes the conflict between the biological and emotional aspects, while Nietzsche’s concept of the transience of existence intertwines with the inevitability of the biological cycle. Finally, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, with their continuous flow, reflect the cyclical nature of life, independent of our emotional constructions and the meanings we assign to them.
Black Sonata for Vivaldi is a photographic investigation that explores the distortions between emotional life and biological life.
The research follows the emotional, continuous, and perpetual perception of defining and giving an existential meaning to physical and organic laws. Just like in Vivaldi's Four Seasons, the natural cycle of biological existence flows independently of our emotional perception and sense-making, overshadowing the structures of meaning we build through our emotional experiences.
Structured in twelve black-and-white images, the series unfolds its narrative following the structure of Antonio Vivaldi's four violin concertos, The Four Seasons. However, while Vivaldi uses violins as the unifying element of his narrative, in Black Sonata for Vivaldi, it is the black-and-white that plays a similar role. Along with the grayscale, it accompanies the general sentiment, using contrasts to harmonize the organic and emotional aspects.
To give voice to the organic and biological aspect of life’s evolution, and as in Vivaldi’s work, the narrative cycle opens with spring and ends with winter. Each season is represented by three photographs, or movements, marking its various stages.
As for the emotional aspect, the task is left to the expression and interaction of the body with its context.
The body is understood as a universal expression, but at the same time as one of uniqueness. It is the body of a woman, inevitably and historically loaded with ancestral, social, emotional, and gendered archetypes. But it is also my body, and as such, rich with empirical individuality, subjective perception of both the psyche's life and that of the biological one. The choice of the self-portrait becomes the tool that relates the body to the context in an intimate yet universal way.
Thus, the subject is placed in a context that, in the background, contrasts the free and uncertain boundaries of the dreamlike dimension, and, in the elements, the physical and natural laws that define the temporal and spatial processes linked to the milieu.
Nature is the rhythm that accompanies the biological stages, translating them into emotions. Flowers, leaves, and fruits speak of organic matter, which, alongside the body, is immersed in evolutionary necessity. It is a dance that follows the natural cycle, reaching winter, where the movement stops, making space for metal, the only inorganic element in the series but with vegetal connotations. Metal symbolizes the fight against sterility that precedes death.
A constant and omnipresent element, however, are the eyes. They are the gaze upon the perception of the body and the context, commenting on the emotional journey of the individual. They look at the dream of existence with a goal—whatever it may be—either to destroy it, amplify it, mock it, or simply observe it with epoché.
They are the memento of the illusion of defining life. Just like in Vivaldi's four concertos, the seasons flow, and biological life passes quickly, at the expense of the rhythm and sense-making constructs we build throughout our emotional life.
