Luigi Visconti is keen on urban landscapes. He is allured in cities with architectural asperity and story to tell about their historical background. Visconti captures faces of cities with a great accuracy, as an architect will do to build his model. He uses both silver and digital equipment, his pictures are often huge dimensions to allow the limitless viewer's wanderer look.
Luigi Visconti took his first great sizes in Abu Dhabi. He is inspired by the architectural diversity of towers still in work. His "Vertigo Cities" 2010 Series, Luigi Visconti stands on New York, Dubai and Shanghai rooftops to draw the contour of these innovative cities which reach the sky. Graphic and colorful urban slides give us such a powerful contagious energy. In La Havana, "Vertigo Cities" 2011 Series his lens is closer and presents an idyllic and intimate view, at the heart of the city centre where he snaps ordinary life scenes in an amazing place with old American cars and stripped plaster frontages. Further, it seems like we are part of the photography like a spark life at the street corners or at the balcony. The city is standing full of light even damaged but beautiful and proud of its palpable colonial gleams.
Paris under the snow is a poetic and melancholic series, which reveals the intrinsic beauty of Paris, with the foolish hope to make believe in a solitary walk in another century. Snowy Paris, it is Paris liberated from its population, its constant noise, erasing the stigmas of the chaotic twenty-first century, to only let arise the architecture in its purest, its most prominent form. It is the silence and the splendor of the past captured here, by the vacuum of its major arteries and intersections, usually so attended. Paris would seem asleep if it was not betrayed by a few subtle details, almost anachronistic, contrasting with this calm apparent. The city, caught between the stark white of the snow and the grey of the morose sky, appears more gentle, more charming, of a beauty which is timeless. The Place Vendôme, the Pont Neuf, the Place de la Concorde, and the rue Croix-des-Petits-Champs are revisited by a lover of Paris, who reveals the city in a garment of dim light.
This series of photos of 2013 bears the imprint of Luigi Visconti as there are angles of view that are dear to him in his various series of urban landscapes : intersections, vanishing lines, perspectives, wide-angle. But Paris under the snow is especially an echo of the White Silence (2015), a series of photographs of the marble quarries of Carrara. We find in both of these series the highlighting of raw materials, ennobled and muted by the silence, all white. The marble in the rough state in Carrara. The stone, bronze, and wood in Paris.
Luigi Visconti is thus moving away from his earlier series that showed the cities in full motion, in excess of colour, life and noise. Paris under the snow and White Silence are perhaps a form of appeasement of the artist, more attracted now by the nature and its silence.
In his latest series, Visconti returns to his Italian roots as he captures the beaches of his native country by sheding a light on mass tourism and the beauty of the Mediterranean landscapes. His photos immerse us in a summer atmosphere, full of nostalgia and charm.
