Lara Gasparotto
Refuge
Lara Gasparotto
Time catches up with everything. Somehow we are possessed with preserving memories , smells, colors and sound. Images are powerful here to steal fractions of time and can reconstruct scarce moments of emotion. Some writers take 800 pages to describe one emotion, others compress their idea into a short story of twenty pages or so. The photographer has a hundredth of a second for that. Lara Gasparetto’s images read like a collection of stories by Raymond Carver. Sometimes we see blurred images of damaged polaroids , a quick sketch on a still life , an explosion of color in a snapshot At first glance they seem to be images of faits divers, of acquaintances in their most intimate moments. Only after careful re-watching do you pay attention to other aspects.
They are images without pretense , soft time bombs of lost moments and stolen happiness. In the new book we see abstract landscapes combined intimate portraits , embraces , still lifes . Many works are lightly painted , the still images become more abstract , take on another dimension beyond photography.
We see images of scarce happiness , softness and compassion . The landscapes are memories of walks , musings , emotions , timeless , image impressions stored in memory like the memories of in search of lost time by Proust. The images are timeless , not tied to any place or event . Some landscapes look like eighteenth century paintings , portraits could have been made in the eighties in new york , Lara switches effortlessly between different styles and processes them into a timeless diary .