This series is decidedly smaller than others in Giacomelli‘s oeuvre. His exploration of the body is in line with his wider approach, which posits the subject as acutely present in its raw, seductive corporeality, with a kind of darkness secreted in its every aspect.
Here, the female body represents Mother Earth. She exudes a fecundity, an expansiveness, a materiality. (This is the agricultural world that Giacomelli inherited from his ancestors: the present mixes with the past; it is rooted in it.) The body is a symbolic, rather than literal, presence, always fragmented and faceless. Giacomelli does not approach the body as a source of perfection or beauty, but mystery. The enigmatic space of the image vibrates with the body’s sinuosity. As always for Giacomelli, it is about ‘getting under the skin of reality.’
Giacomelli photographed the people around him (as was his practice): he created images of that which was already familiar to him, undressing reality for this series so as to assign it his own form, which emanates from his transformative photographic gaze.
The photographs were taken in 1956, and the series was then expanded in the 1990s to include other nudes and Giacomelli’s self-portraits.
‘The idea of the nude first came to me in the hospice […]; it’s always this world that interests me most, this world that’s coming to a close, which we are unable to understand at the time, but which we begin to understand much later, when it’s too late.’
(Mario Giacomelli in A. C. Quintavalle, Mario Giacomelli, Feltrinelli, Milano 1980)
