Marco Pietracupa: MY PRIVATE PLACE
Marco Pietracupa’s world, as represented in this exhibition, “My private place”, is fundamentally one of human figures and white walls. A narration-by-images soaked in eroticism and a sense of fun, taking place in the live-in studio where the artist works and lives, moving between fashion (but it might be more appropriate to call it ‘the aesthetic of fashion’) and a personal research that Pietracupa has brought forward in parallel to his professional career.
The show is divided in three parts: Privato, Casting e Striptease. The Privato section is precisely that: a slice of the more private life of the photographer and his closest family. Key moments in his personal development, portraits of his nearest and dearest, hidden details that become symbols of his everyday life. The Casting section represents the perfect trait d’union between those two journeys, the professional and the personal, that was mentioned before: it is a series of “unique” portraits of models taken during the casting sessions. The result is a set of ironically titillating, never vulgar nudes and partial nudes, that go a long way in summing up Pietracupa’s imagery. The third section, Striptease, is a special game: two actual stripteases in the dark, the figures revealed only subsequently, by the flash of the camera. The models appear in the same space as the photographer, but the darkness that surrounds them also strips them of any inhibition and shyness, taking us back to a sensation of that awareness of one’s body and movements that is typical of when you’re alone, in front of a mirror.
The last characteristic of “My private place”, is Pietracupa’s choice of working, in this case, exclusively with analogic photography. All the passages, from the initial development to the final print, exclude any digital act; not as a form of nostalgia, but as a way to give a certain aesthetic coherence to the entire project.
VICE GALLERY / January 17th , Via Giacomo Watt 32, 7pm
By Federico Sarica & Gianluca Cantaro | Image courtesy of Marco Pietracupa & Vice Magazine