For Padua with no rhetoric

Published: 2007 - November, Culture

Padua could not find a more passionate cantor than Giovanni Umicini. In his seemingly three-dimensional black & white timeless photographs the Tuscan artist captures a Padua that is glowing with an inner light, almost magical. But then Padua is a bit magical. Just look at the Palazzo della Ragione with its hull-like roof whose design was inspired by the Scorpio Constellation, the zodiac sign under which the city was founded, and embellished by frescoes depicting tarot cards and the zodiac. Umicini, who is not a Padua native (the photographer, an exponent of the New Humanism, was born in Florence in the 1930s), has been very successful in capturing with his street snapshots the soul of the a city, the deep sense of solitude that can be detected in a look, the cadenza of a mood at the exact moment it changes. Umicini, called Giovanni by everybody, is perhaps hard like a rock, irritable and shy, but wholeheartedly generous – being that ‘damned Tuscan guy’ who would have fascinated Curzio Malaparte. Umicini’s overflowing generosity is evident in his photographs which are at times polemical, almost part of a social protest, but devoid of any rhetoric. In his 162 photographs (selected from a mountain of 897 works) the Tuscan photographer, member of the New York Academy of Sciences, brings the city of Padua to life through its various places and the faces of its denizens. His soft prints conjure the most famous places in the city immortalized by night, or other places like Prato della Valle, Piazza dei Signori, Piazza delle Erbe and Santa Giustina. These are places where humanity is mum, where only light is cast on the façades of Romanesque churches, on 16th-century stairs and whitewashed walls of the Palazzo della Gran Guardia, on the eye-lashes of a wet grass after rainfall on the Isola Memmia, or on the thick fog wrapping the Clock-Tower. Paradoxically, Giovanni Umicini portrays a silent cityscape, often at night, at rare moments when the city is deserted, almost as if caught off-guard in its dazzling beauty. The day seems to belong to man in the poetry of the street photographer. Portraits of simple men, perhaps peasants, caught in their everyday, almost festive, life. The people crystallized in Umicini’s photographs do not belong to any specific time, or any period; they live in a different dimension, made of gestures and smiles that are part of an intimate sphere removed from any specific moment. They are children playing or housewives shopping under the Salone where men holding glasses are chatting. Umicini’s captured beauty is almost ‘Pasolinian’ with its disconcerting attention to those who fall behind, to derelicts, to the forsaken, to those with simple hearts and simple minds. It is an intimate fresco that gives voice to an emotional intelligence symbolized by a girl seated on a Lambretta staring deep in thought, at a color perhaps, or a furtive cat. The heroes Umicini captures with his inseparable camera are members of the working class, without an ideology, prototypes of a secular Paduan attitude, jovial and hard-working, around city squares, the Ghetto, the Portello, reflecting in their mild poverty a universe which, for those who don’t know where to look, seems to have disappeared, but in fact has always been there. That’s why the image of two lovers kissing or a kid ogling the camera with a sly look are not part of yesterday or today – perhaps of tomorrow. In a city like Padua, which was a notorious battleground during the anni di piombo (Years of Lead, referring to the years of guerrilla terror acts in the 1970s), Umicini could have become a leading shutter-happy news photographer. He would have had enough material in a city that gained national notoriety for the number of its dead, its bad teachers, its street clashes, its walls splashed with red from the blood of victims of the Red Brigades, its wrecked streets missing pavement stones, its special courtrooms where killers would shout their senseless hate through iron bars. But Giovanni Umicini never wanted any of it. His art was something else. Shocking news photos did not attract him.
Giovanni Umicini loves black & white because he knows no half measures, and if he were to depict the 1970s in Padua he would not have held back judgment of anyone. He preferred, rather, to perpetuate the childlike joy of a young Go-Kart racer and match it provocatively with the desperation of an old beggar, assuming as pretext the solitude of old age in order to offer it consolation in the hands of St. Anthony’s friars. A St. Anthony (the patron saint of Padua) who breezes through the concreteness of the works, in the language and life of Padua and Paduans, a saint who is everybody’s saint.
Umicini’s artistic idiom is cinematographic. His photographs seem like a storyboard for a film. This should not be a surprise, as the Florentine master has worked as director of photography and camera operator on a number of films, including “Anna e la mosca” for Sirio Luginbuhl, “Piccolo Arthur” for Maurizio Targhetta and those produced through his artistic collaboration with Paduan director Carlo Mazzacurati, “I Vagabondi,” “La lingua del Santo” and “A cavallo della tigre.” A tireless experimenter, Giovanni Umicini has contributed with his chromatic-structural quest to cementing his artistic bond with Emilio Vedova and Hans Hartung, welcomed and frequent guests at his Padua studio. But it is still actually the city of Padua that inspires all the love, the energy and Tuscan determination in Umicini, who to celebrate it has put together snapshots of a life, of many lives, many faces, many stories – a magmatic, dense material, a compilation of experiences that Umicini presents with renewed generosity as a gift to his city: Padua.

Giovanni Umicini “Per Padova”
Civic Museum on Piazza del Santo
Through January 13, 2008.

Open Tuesday to Sunday, 10am - 1pm and 3.30 - 6.30pm.
Closed Mondays, December 25 and 26, 2007, and January 1, 2008.
Admission: 3 Euro; free for all school groups, university students, children under 18.