The words I never said to you. The words I wanted to say. The unmeaning sense of those words that I never had the opportunity to tell.
Empty pages of stories never written. Invisible but sensitive bruises that the body dresses. To evoke a lack, to suggest the absence. The words on our skin are the symbolic legacy of what life has left us inside. It is the infinite gravitational weight of silence that sediments in the depths of the soul. Overwhelming sense of void. Unbearable sidereal darkness born from the collapse of the firmament. The abyss of a night without dawn, concealed secret night, perceptible as shadow on black canvas.
Shadows can be a safe shelter. They give comfort and refresh from the excruciating din of light. They protect us from our past haunted memories.
Shadows are made of the same substance as silence. A space, expressive and significant, of isolation, but not of solitude, where the need for emotional detachment becomes a moment of awareness of our frailties and our unease. It is an uncorrupted skin, free of cuts, scars, bruises. It is a primordial skin without deception.
But in these photos silence can show also its malignant nature. It is a caustic poetics, sounding board which amplifies and expands the dimension of alienation and deprivation, like bitter poison that intoxicates and numbs reason and feelings. It is an amputation of the soul. A slow relentless crumbling oblivion.
These photos are not literal portraits, but allegorical and symbolic mirror in which we project our regret for all that has never been and it returns to us the image not of a face, but of a condition of existential restlessness. An intimate gaze that opens onto an interior space to investigate the changing declinations and endless shadesof the sense of uneasiness of the human soul.
About Roberto De Mitri
Where black and white guarantees depth and thickness to the photographic language, giving it evocative strength and emotional impulse, LE photography is important not only from the point of view of the aesthetic value, but also and especially for its mastery and inclination to create surreal and metaphysical scenarios, unreal places as if they arose from the depths of our unconscious. Through it is possible to explore a dimension that belongs not to the sensorial and rational experience, but to the experience of suggestion, of irrational and of the unreal. Seascapes and urban contexts they lose their objectivity and substance and become reflection of a secret and private condition of the soul.
Therefore photography never assumes the function of providing a merely descriptive or aesthetically artificial reproduction of the real, but becomes metaphorical expression and manifestation of a feeling. Allegorical illustration of the transience and emptiness of life. Of an existential condition profoundly marked by the sense of impermanence and chaos.
De Mitri tries to bring out these feelings and suggestions from his photos. So a simple black and white photo can take on the tones and colors of solitude, of alienation, of melancholy, of nostalgia for what is forever lost.
Born in Italy, graduated in Economics at the University of Bologna, Roberto De Mitri have overcome the “Black & White Spider Awards” 2014 category “Fine art – Amateur” with the photo “De silent of sand”. In 2015, he gets the second place in Fine Art, abstract category, for the series “Nigredo” at International Photography Awards. In 2016, he won the 11th edition of the Black and White Spider Awards, abstract category, with “De Fall”, winning the title of “Honor of Distinction” in Photographer of the Year. In 2018, he gets the first place in Fine Art, abstract category, for the series “Solaris” at International Photography Awards. [Official Website]
