Table Studies, Installation View, Bologna MUSEI, Casa Morandi, 2016
Curated by Alessia Masi
"Looking at his works of those years, one can see that David Adika already has a clear vision of his path. Starting from photography, he adds images which are absolutely devoid of any reference to other specific items.
“My photographs are a by-product of the reality of my life. They deal with my personal biography, the collective memory of the society in which I live, and they connect political reality to social reality. In my photographic work, I want to show the presence of beauty, and for this I use strategies of seduction and capture. I am looking for the photographic moment - a specific event of beauty realized in the mechanical photographic act that will fix it forever as a photograph”.
Photography, then, as the search for beauty, as a medium able to express seduction and sensuality even through common objects like a plastic bottle or a melon, able to transform the ordinary into something extraordinary and special through the attempt to instill “beauty in everything” - as he says - and leaving it to the visitor to determine aesthetic value, or rather to consider the possibility that “aesthetics” is not just a matter of beauty, but also a function of the relationship between place, identity, image and gaze.
Adika, like many other artists all over the world, gladly acknowledges that he finds inspiration in Morandi's work, as a synthesis of color, balance, sensibility and simplicity. So, the decision to exhibit some of Adika's works in the house on Via Fondazza is intended as a further confirmation of the extent to which Morandi's art continues to be a field of research and a source of inspiration for so many young artists.
Indeed, it is obvious that the Israeli artist has also internalized the Morandian lesson according to a personal vision, achieved through a careful study of composition and a profound inquiry into the relationship between idea and reality. Subverting the Bressonian theory of the “decisive moment”, as the great French photographer defines the unexpected instant that is worthy of being immortalized, Adika uses the photographic medium to overcome any time-related contingency and to articulate “mental and social questions”. What makes his work really extraordinary is light, a very pure and original light, which almost seems to reject shadow. Although it departs from the pictorial nature of Morandi's light, it evokes it, succeeding in “writing” (from photos graphia = writing with light) images whose similarity is no more than apparent, in perfect harmony with Morandi's variants.
“I let myself be totally guided by the light, and I am always in motion, along a path that is a continuous effort to subdue the light”.
In Table Studies the minor changes and the subtle variations of light and composition are preparatory to the construction of sense and significance.
Seen in sequence, the works seem like frames of a film that restore to each individual subject its own particular significance and expressive value. They look like fragments of an action in motion, where the sometimes imperceptible movement of the subject, or at other times its disappearance, recreates a balanced framing, with an orchestral rhythm and a strong geometrical tension. “If I were to have another life, I would work in the cinema,” the Bolognese artist once said, according to the oral testimony of Carlo Zucchini, sponsor of the Morandi donation. A phrase that most probably alludes precisely to the possibility of seeing his works as a succession of frames, of images that appear in succession, only to be connected in a single large-scale scene, just as happens in film. Likewise in the case of Adika, where the artist playfully overturns the image, we should read his unceasing efforts to undermine the existing order as suggesting new relationships between identity, gaze and sign, beyond prearranged classifications and divisions.
Table Studies, Installation View, Bologna MUSEI, Casa Morandi, 2016
Curated by Alessia Masi
Table Studies #01, Paris 2015
color photography, Ink Jet Print
Table Studies #02, Paris 2015
color photography, Ink Jet Print
Table Studies #03, Paris 2015
color photography, Ink Jet Print
Table Studies #04, Paris 2015
color photography, Ink Jet Print
Table Studies #05, Paris 2015
color photography, Ink Jet Print
Table Studies #06, Paris 2015
color photography, Ink Jet Print
Table Studies #07, Paris 2015
color photography, Ink Jet Print
Table Studies #08, Paris 2015
color photography, Ink Jet Print
Table Studies (SKETCH / Site Specific), For Casa Morandi,
Bologna, Italy.
