Arnaldo Dal Bosco
InMagine
Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine #1, 2021.
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Print size 108 x 161 cm. Edition of 1 + 1 Artist Proofs.
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Print size 108 x 161 cm. Edition of 1 + 1 Artist Proofs.
Skin and body of photographyArnaldo Dal Bosco’s ‘InMagine’ series is a collection of works that challenges head on some of the most fundamental and formidable preconceptions relating to the essence, nature and purpose of photography.
Within his images, which he treats more like research than creative practice, Dal Bosco deconstructs and reframes the primordial questions around pictorial representation, materiality, form, composition and beauty, which are ingrained within the core of photographic practice and theory, and reassembles them in such a way where the permanence of analogue photography becomes inexorably linked with the pliability, recombinability and immateriality of the digital world. By intervening and manipulating the chemical components of analogue film slides, Dal Bosco operates with surgical intensity directly on what is a unique moment captured in time. Through the chemical altering and resurfacing of the film emulsion and composition, the elements are rearranged in a similar way that blocks of data are recombined to form new pieces of information. The result is equally beautiful and captivating visually as it is conceptually stimulating, completely removing the borders between photography, painting, analogue and digital. Presented alongside the series, Gold Circle is proud to include a discerning and insightful commentary on the work by famed Italian writer, historian and photography critic, Paolo Barbaro. |
Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine #5, 2021.
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Print size 108 x 161 cm. Edition of 1 + 1 Artist Proofs.
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Print size 108 x 161 cm. Edition of 1 + 1 Artist Proofs.
'Skin and body of photography'
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Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine #15, 2021.
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.).
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.).
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In that book, then, the great Hungarian artist and theorist proclaimed the need to emancipate photography from the merely reproductive function of reality, towards awareness of the productive vocation of the technical image. Can we somehow read the history of image production of the last thirty years as the triumph of Moholy’s prophecy?
In fact, digital photography is entirely, radically synthetic, every relationship with the referent of the images is mediated by numerical series, infinitely renegotiable. The evident tonal freedom, the complexity of the levels of reading of these photographs by Dal Bosco can encourage their reading in the context of the cultures and practices of the digital image but, apart from the fact that their realization does not make use in any way of computer post-productions, I believe that the verse of the historical reference must be rotated somewhere else, back to Talbot’s Pencil of Nature, at the dawn of photography. |
Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine #2, 2021.
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.).
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.).
Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine #3, 2021. Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ® Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.). |
Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine #4, 2021. Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ® Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.). |
Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine #6, 2021.
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.).
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.).
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After the mid-twentieth century, the distinction between painting and photography and their dialectic (for some a fight, for someone else not, but I don’t think it’s that interesting) is played on still other tables. Among the various events, it is worth mentioning the case of Nino Migliori, who claims the specific belonging to photography of his non-figurative research which, since its inception, around 1948, has been accompanied by photography between neorealism and subjective photography. His Oxidations, Pyrograms, other researches, welcome in the sign of the photographic operation writings that cross materials, languages, cultures of the image mediated by often playful applications of photography itself. Some of these interest us, on this occasion, for their movement between awareness of conceptual research, internal to a clearly materialist theory of art. In particular, I am thinking of the Antimemoria series (1968), where the image is constructed by the work of destruction that time, mold, and humidity perform on a previous image, usually a waste photographic plate, which has come out of the client’s circuit, which becomes pretext for a figuration produced by nature, by the will of the photographer.
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Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine #15, 2021.
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.).
Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag,
face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ®
Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.).
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These images by Arnaldo Dal Bosco show a further leap, in a gesture that in recent years we have also seen conducted by other authors, Vasco Ascolini and Cesare Di Liborio come to mind. There is a radical difference, however, it seems to me, between the informal branding operations of Migliori and these works by Dal Bosco. In twentieth-century episodes such as that of the Bolognese photographer, the meaning seems to be that of the search for a projective figuration that relies on the involuntary act -nature that operates outside the control of the author- and adopts photography as a ready-made, as an object found and independent of the photographer’s operation.
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Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine AS#1, 2021. Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ® Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.). |
Arnaldo Dal Bosco, InMagine AS#1a, 2022. Fine art pigment inkjet print on archival paper Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, face-mounted to Acrylic through Diasec ® Edition of 3 + 1 Artist Proofs.
(variable sizes in the unique limited edition of 3 + 1 a.p.). |
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Dal Bosco instead acts within his own work, on photographs (mostly slides, the most “rigid” and controlled material among those of twentieth century photography) which are dissolved and then reinvented with a meticulous action, almost ultraminiature: it is a matter of acting by dissolving, reassembling, entering with entomologist gestures on a very fragile surface of a handful of square millimeters. It is interesting how it is an action that proceeds in the opposite direction to the one that gave rise to the original photograph. In fact, Dal Bosco has a long and established history behind him as an architectural photographer, advertising photographer, and we know that these are applications, not to mention genres, where the dominant rhetoric is that of cleanliness, transparency, images where you don’t have to see the work of the installation, everything must be correctly illuminated, nothing must interfere with the well-tuned spectacle of the subject, the photographer and his materials must not appear, light and space tend to be out of time, perpetual. Here, instead, we see the skin of the image, the emulsion that denounces its being a fragile and unstable matter, and a recomposition with new arrangements in figurations that invite us to get lost in detail where an earlier figure and general plot emerge, a reinvention of the time of the image that often spreads outside, above and perhaps beyond the frame.
We could speculate that this new quality of research is linked to the material foundations thus changed: the need, when photography becomes completely immaterial, numerical, synthetic, to regain a sensitive body, tormented even but always talking. For this body that suffers or rejoices in beauty there is a common word: passion. |
Portrait of Arnaldo Dal Bosco at work
All images ©Arnaldo Dal Bosco
Text by Paolo Barbaro, Historian and critic of photography
Courtesy of Paola Sosio Contemporary Art
Text by Paolo Barbaro, Historian and critic of photography
Courtesy of Paola Sosio Contemporary Art
Arnaldo Dal Bosco |
Paola Sosio Contemporary Art |
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Arnaldo Dal Bosco began to photograph in 1981, marking the start of a photographic journey that has moved along a parallel track of photography on commission and personal research.
Having developed a portfolio of commissioned works created over three decades, Dal Bosco has been commissioned to produce works by high end publications such as Casa Vogue, Brava Casa and advertising campaigns for Fiat and Heineken, amongst others. Equally active within the fine art photography sphere since 1983, he has worked with and exhibited in numerous art galleries in a variety of prestigious European and international locations. Since 2015, his personal work has been developed around an analytical and exploratory investigation of the photographic medium itself, with a particular focus on the relationship between materiality and representation. Through intervening on material from his analogue archive, primarily slides that he manipulates with minimal gestures and chemical agents, he has created a body of abstract works that examine the inexorable relationship between photography and pictorialism, with a view to highlighting the intensity of a digital era and its effect on image making. @arnaldodalbosco |
Paola Sosio Contemporary Art, Milan is an artistic project born in 2009 mostly dedicated to the Art Photography. A “nomadic gallery” that chose an innovative approach for developing a lively and unusual programme of synergies and twinning with galleries and unusual spaces, for hosting well-known and mid career artists next to emerging talents. The “gallery” is based in Milan, but with his “movable walls” can be anywhere; participates to major Art Fairs.
Paola Sosio, contemporary art lover, has worked for several years with prestigious brands in the world, as Bulgari and Loropiana, covering key positions. www.paolasosioartgallery.com |