Valentino Fialdini
Brazil - 1976
Valentino has been a professional photographer since the age of 20, when he left his love of food for the weekends and decided to work with his father, the renowned photographer Rômulo Fialdini. His work has gained more prominence recently after he showcased the "Lego" series, in which the artist uses the well-known toy to build structures with their colorful docking modules. "Lego" was created in Denmark in the 1940s and only came to Brazil in the 1980s when the artist's generation, born in 1976, was delighted and played with the little pieces. "Lego" means "good play", and that's exactly what Valentino did, played very well and got a thought-provoking result.
The first series - Untitled, 2010 [Legos] can be seen in the collection of the gallery – it consists of large extensions of an empty space in methacrylate, an structure that could be anywhere. We do not know the scale. Perspective makes us believe that it is a place where we can enter, but we are not sure. It's all an illusion, a magic of photography, the right angle, the special lens, and a sharp look. One question is especially clear: the color that permeates this artificial space is bright but small as a doll's house. The color overtakes the spaces created by Fialdini.
From this the work of Valentino takes on a pictorial vocation, an energetic search for new ways and discoveries. After tirelessly visiting several art galleries the artist begins to worry about dissecting the space, the light, the white cube that makes the exhibition space a neutral place where everything can inhabit and happen temporarily. He resolved to redo the white cube of the gallery with the small pieces of his lego. Here is the White Cube series, consisting of five large-format methacrylate photographs exhibited together for the first time at the AM Art Gallery. Here the importance of color to the artist is clear: he begins to paint the space, the toy exhibition room receives a light installation where the color emitted by fluorescent lamps, diffused by a small vegetal paper placed in the ceiling, invades the place and everything becomes one color.
In this direction, in the following series, "Translucent", Fialdini intensifies the simulation of the space with more columns, shadows that suggest people, windows and doors. And the painting becomes more evident when the vegetable paper turns to the wall and several lamps from behind are mixed coloring the space.
Valentino wants to leave the space of the model where the experience of the public is realized only from the image of light and color. He wants to go into real space by providing an encounter of the body with the space impregnated by the color that comes from the light. In the White Cube show two color studies made especially for space can be seen: "Fluorescent color study", in which 8 fluorescent lamps paint the gallery column and "Transparency color study" where a transparent red sticker covers the entire facade of space glass. These two works are present to indicate the artist's research and are only the beginning of a series of projects in which pictorial discourse in space is present but without ever abandoning photography and seducing the image.
Sources:
Photo: http://glamurama.uol.com.br/galeria/zipper-galeria-74246/
