Gian Paolo Barbieri - Dark Memories

Barbieri’s approach to nude photography has been a lengthy one – a slow and carefully planned one. He first explored the subject in his book trilogy Tropici. These experiments, however, did not quite satisfy him: his fear of vulgarity, his yearning to illustrate the world according to his own personal conception, whereby even the most violent scenes must be “ennobled”, and his search for a suitable technique were problems that absorbed his mind for years. The human body and sex are an exuberant expression of nature. Barbieri’s nudes appear natural, direct, life-like, rich, joyous, and marked by dazzling expressive purity and simplicity. His photographs bring together the prehistoric approach to the human body, the aesthetic pursuit of Classical Greek beauty, and the Renaissance rediscovery of freedom. All this is expressed through an outstanding “studio” technique. Thus his series of nudes, Dark Memories, represents a homage to this natural exuberance in all of its forms. Without any contrived prudishness, or fear of the banal, but with a child-like happiness and innocence, it plays upon the thin red line which has never clearly divided so-called pure art from polluted art, poetry from vulgarity, the sacred from the profane.