Mario Lasalandra. Poets, masks, actors, ghosts

Subjugated by the ideal of "true", the literary topoi of objectivity and automatism, photography has always had to struggle to assert its status as art - that of invention and language. It is in this battle that Lasalandra Mario touches a very high place, and the merit of having brought back, definitely exceptional in Italy, photography functions primitive art : the evocation, the story, the myth-making.
Born in 1933 in Este, on the southern edge of the Euganean Hills, in the fifties Lasalandra inherits the atelier of his maternal grandfather, Frederick Tuzza painter and photographer. Soon she began to alternate business with original research, photographing in desolate clownish characters, on which the influence of the first films of Fellini ( La Strada, Nights of Cabiria ) is very much evident. In short , the scenes are becoming more complex, and Lasalandra begins to build great stories that, even without a rigorous dramaturgical coherence, are full of references to and evocations of allefigure mythography of the modern. This is how his most famous series, Judgement, 1967 Scarecrow, 1968 Amateur Dramatics, 1968 Story of a drama, 1970s, populated by charming hosts of angels, virgins, prophets, masks, actors, ghosts. Staggering figures, which manifest through their precarious equilibrium, the instability of an era in which photography in Italy is criss-crossed by a deep crisis and irreparable. But the figures, at the same time, which feed on a relationship with history - from daguerreotypes to August Sander, David Bailey Diane Arbus - in a highly original way. And that you offer in a relentless, and still unexhausted, variety of types and situations. Figures that make Mario Lasalandra one of the most innovative and brilliant authors of contemporary photography.
Paolo Morello

Vai alla guida d'arte di Venice