Davide Bramante(Syracuse 1970) and Salvo Alibrio (Ragusa 1988) have been dating for some time. Bramante is an art photographer with a very solid career and a great experience of exhibitions gained during his stays in Turin, Rome, Bologna, Milan and New York. Alibrio has always been considered a high-class reporter, however, has amply demonstrated his ability to do much more. With the campaign commissioned to him in Palazzolo Acreide by the Dolce & Gabbana designers for spring / summer 2020, with various solo shows held between Europe and Japan and now producing a series of images that I have the honor to bring for the first time on display in the brand new San Sebastiano headquarters Contemporary in Palazzolo.
The damned virus didn't stop us. With the help of technology, the exhibition will be inaugurated digitally. Ready to open the door of the building of Palazzolo Acreide as soon as the safety parameters of Phase 2 allow us
On the ground floor. Davide Bramante exhibits three large images created on a metal support (one black and white 70x210 from 2016, and two colors 70x100 and 100x150 from 2019) with multi exposure technique as well as three paintings on photographic collage from the 2017 series (two 70x90mn and one 90x130) imprisoned by plexiglass boxes. And finally three watercolors on photographic paper. This is an unusual exhibition for him which is famous among collectors for his multi-exposure shots where photography becomes abstraction but still "on your face". Because in this exhibition Bramante travels a route it is the opposite of what Walter Benjamin in his wonderful Angelus Novus outlines as a loss of the aura in the transition from painting to photography. Quite the opposite here the path taken leads the artist starting from the photographic image to measure himself with painting and even drawing.
On the first floor. Except for Alibrio, he exhibits nine 50x75 photographic panels on a metal support. It consists of six black and white and three colors with a single theme: the tree. These are trees, only one each time against the background of skies that seem painted. Often the exact same tree photographed in different seasons. But be careful it is not its faded or missing flower crown that is the protagonist here: it is not a landscape, nothing "bucolic" or "romantic" nothing is “sweet” in Alibrio's photos. Because these wonderful but very modern Sicilian images are actually the portrait of plant monuments, beautiful, but also disturbing. I read them as an accusation against the stupidity of mankind capable of devastating the environment in which it is immersed, depriving itself of a beauty so dazzling as to be sometimes - just like it happens here - in turn fierce. A way of looking at nature that is both very modern and ancient. A synthesis in which the artist is truly at ease
Aldo Premoli