Overview

Max Farina recorded with his camera every variation of light and everything that hap-pened, staying still for 312 hours at the same place: the center of the Rialto Bridge, the most crowded and photographed place in Venice, facing the Grand Canal. In two years, he has caught any change, focusing his attention on the single fragments that make up the landscape, as if looking through the eyes of flies and dragonflies. The result is not a single image, but a multiplicity of images. The visual perception depends on the variable and almost infinitely changeable editing, of every single piece that make up a perfect and unstable, fascinating and ever-changing landscape: both night and day, sunrise and sunset, yesterday and the day before yesterday. Similar to puzzles, his images do not capture one single moment, but they become a perspective drawn by the time going by. They don’t interpret anything in a subjective or expressive way, but enhance the camera and its “mechanical” look, like a magical recording tool. Farina uses photography to cre-ate images that you can only get thanks to the camera and to its technological uncon-scious. He “shatters the stereotype of Venice” and offers a kind of machine à voir which invites us to see the Grand Canal as through a magnifying glass, to scrutinize the slight-est details made by light and darkness, waters and skies, buildings and boats, crowds and silence... Rivus Altus is a work still in progress.