PAOLO DELL’ELCE

NOCTI

Nocti is the latest photographic work by Paolo Dell’Elce; thirty-four shots extrapolated from a series dedicated – as suggested by the title – to the theme of night. Paged within the rooms of Fondazione La Rocca, they present themselves to the viewer in the form of clusters and spots of color that, taking turns with the white of the gallery’s walls, they could almost seem words or traces of writing on what can be imagined as scattered pages of a diary in the making.

Among the various themes explored by Dell’Elce throughout his extensive career, in addition to nature, which has always been central to his discourse, the theme of writing holds a fundamental place. Not only is this theme tied to the choice of his expressive medium (photography, from the ancient Greek phôs, meaning light, and graphè, meaning writing or drawing, hence “writing with light” or “drawing with light”), but it also suggests his precise intention to be a part of a phenomenon where light breathes life and form into signs, objects, and things, seen and captured in another time by his gaze.

Light is, then, the very heart of his Nocti project and of his entire work. Light is the language, light is the way to knowledge that our artist has never, not even a day, failed to pursue. The theme of time is also present in Dell’Elce’s work, but it is a metaphysical and exquisitely qualitative time. He deals with kairós rather than chrònos, so much for pushing him, since his early days, to search a personal way of making photography which is especially defined by emotional elements.

Attracted by the nature of objects, Paolo Dell’Elce observes the realm of the visible, creating an extensive repertoire of images that depict the ongoing dialogue between nature and culture, culminating in the construction of a new, mental, ideal, and conceptual landscape – a novel visual landscape – where nature and culture can finally coincide. A crucial aspect of Nocti is also its connection to Aesthetics.

Paolo Dell’Elce undeniably explores the sublime, seeking it in nature, in the act of its observation, and generating images that express a refined aesthetic where the sublime represents an inclination towards the spiritual, the intellectual, and aesthetics, precisely.

It is within the ideas of sensation and perception that his entire thinking about “beauty” unfolds. Dell’Elce’s Nocti is a proposal for every human quest. It is one of the many holzwege, to borrow from Heidegger, which, “as a woodpath of human investigation, is both a way and a diversion, an advancement and a bewilderment”.

Paolo Dell’Elce and his Nocti should be observed and acknowledged as a beautiful metaphor for the inherent need for knowledge in humanity.