temporal shortcut
The interest aroused by this new work of Alessandro Rivola seems to be prompted by both the treatment and the subject matter. As far as the first is concerned, everything centres around the fusion, the overlapping, the short circuit, that is established between the historic dimension and the contemporary work, between the explicit reference to an academic genre, the altar-piece, and a photographic technique, strongly rooted in contemporary art. For Rivola, however, the fact that his work has taken this direction is not the result of a momentary or extemoraneous choice. Spreadinglight-sensitive emulsion directly on a wall or on wood, then exposing it and treating it using photographic techniques, he has managed to drastically shorten the distance between a modern techniques and some of the features associated with historic traditions, such as frescos or painting on wooden panels.
The aim of this process never appears to be the golden revival of a standard technique, such as photography, but rather the refusal of any idea of caesura or interruptions in historical developement. There are no chapters that close or other that open, but a kind of continual enumeration of pages that gives continuity an fluid connections between one phase and another. In fact, it is precisely these contemporary technique, like photography, that have enabled this to happen: if we say that each single image keeps the past alive, it is clear that we are referring to the basic and general category of photography tout court .
If our discoveries about the process adopted by Rivola have led us to enphasise the denial of a caesura between past and present, perhaps something analogous could also be said about the subject of this work. The fragment of the statue of the emperor Costantine, magnified and emphasised in the image, apart from belonging to history in itself, is well-known as it become simbolically associated with all Christian iconography. The raised forefinger pointing upwards indicates the truth and the way for the citizen or believer to follow, the direction to aim for, the correct path, showing a presence, and it is certainly relevant that today the strongest debates about the theoretical identity of photography, revolve around the nature of that particular type of sign that semiologists call the index, a sign that, we know, contains a privileged cause/effect link with its own object. Photography is considered an index because it gathers a presence, replaces rather than represents, in the same way that, in pagan and Christian iconography, the pointing finger is the index finger, the forefinger, directly connected with the presence, par excellence, of the emperor-god or of the Christian god.
