The world of photography has changed drastically since the first photographs produced in the 1830s. Technology evolves constantly and giant steps have been taken toward perfecting the photographic image. The very purpose of the camera, after all, is to create an imprint, a faithful reproduction of a portion of reality immortalized as it really is at a specific moment in time. Undoubtedly, the most shocking aspect of photography at the time of its introduction was the pretence that it be included in the art world and that a mechanical device could be entrusted with creating something of aesthetic worth and artistic genius. This was a common opinion that endured at length. In short, photography opened the door to a new era, one in which reproduction did not place limits on the prestige of an artistic product and in which the role of the artist-fabler succumbed to a new approach to making art. Even the role of the operator had altered and technical skill ceased being the fundamental requisite for defining artistic quality. Furthermore, reality had become part of aesthetics and this was an extraordinary fact. In addition, photography was not restricted to mere faithful reproductions of real circumstances but also to temporal contexts. Photography attests to the fact that "a specific object actually existed and it existed in the very place where I see it now. "Photography, then, is a bizarre medium, a new form of hallucination that is false in terms of perception but real in terms of time."
This, then, is the starting point of Marco Veronese's work. He draws inspiration from a dialectical concept that renders the medium highly attractive and fascinating. It is stimulating to affirm that a photograph can contain both the pretence of reality and the seed of the fiction of certainty. To understand Veronese's work, it is necessary to refer to Roland Barthes and quote him on the issue. "Photography,' he wrote, "is literally an emanation of the referent. Ultimately, it is a medium that preserves a connection with reality because it resembles it and faithfully reproduces facts when fact is not on hand, thereby spurring the recollection and awareness of what is visible. This is where photography and Cracking Art meet. Both deal with a reality ot which man is no longer aware. Through their work, the artists help recover this awareness, each in their own manner. Another characterizing trait of Cracking is the use of plastic, a material that the group deems valid because of its origins in nature. Cracking gives plastic a new identity and ethical worth. Derived from petroleum, plastic has close ties with nature and with world history in terms of its development and evolution. This is why it is suited to any activity aimed at recovering an awareness of the world, of how it was and how it is.
As of 1991, Veronese began work on his Fossili Sintetici, photographs subjected to various chemical alterations intended to stimulate visual reactions to the partial realities contained in the pictures. Man has lost an awareness of things and he lacks the ability to remain enraptured and in awe of shapes and even the absence of things he sees. He must, in some way, reacquire vision and render it active, more simulating and positive. By inserting small amounts of polyethylene into his pictures, Veronese introduces an element of intrigue that stimulates curiosity, both perceptive and intellectual. Perceived as a real and familiar, the subject of the photograph has been altered and thus requires the brain's analytical processing to be fully understood. In a way, the artist is breathing new life into starfish and shells that have become fossils, not as a result of obsolescence or of the natural process of absorption of materials but because they have been taken for granted, ignored arid thus robbed of their role within the lifecycle that man has appropriated, determining a new arid careless code of nature. Veronese's objective goes beyond reawakening an intellectual and visual awareness of the world to bring back the vital substance that has been taken away from it and allowed to exist as such for too long. Plastic is a natural material that returns corporeal consistency to those objects, giving them a new flesh, made of plastic, but also a new life to compensate for the one that has been taken away. Even fossilized objects contain a life force that is the breath of history. In his latest works, Fossili Contemporanel, this history is evident. These works contain a new force born of the introduction of a new element, one that Veronese defines the "gestural, magical and ancestral mark of primitive art". It is a mark, though, "devised using a modem material, silicone".
Thus, enriched with primordial symbols, past and present continue to chase each other in a constant game involving references to the past until everything is blended to form a new dimension born of an interaction between photography and plastic. Relying on the different possibilities offered by either mean, photography and plastic unite until they form a sort of middle ground that safeguards the power of each without ever forming a neutral context. Capable of finding a meeting point, the two techniques generate something conceptually new and highly prolific. But by no means does Veronese stop here, indeed his research continues, and the bond between time past and time present is reformulated yet again by means of the Contaminazioni (Cross-pollinations), by which the works become authentic experiences of history, a history in which the beauty of classical Masterpieces- from the ladies of Bronzino to Michelangelo's Virgin Maries- evince a cogent relevance to our own times that the comparison with plastic merely goes to underscore. Thus the signs of today's world are mixed with those of the past, demonstrating the complexity of a process that lasts forever, namely, the ongoing coherence of a sort of continuous trajectory composed of nodes and enlightened personages, in which the flow of ideas remains a constant, that natural drive to expand the mind's standards of thinking. In this way, history becomes a sort of unbroken passage of witnesses, a quest in which one must muster all one's energies, assemble all the indispensable stimuli, and for this reason one cannot forgo the beauty and experiences of the past, because they not only assist us in our quest but they are indeed fundamental for deciphering and comprehending the present, and for fostering the growth of civilization, culture, and the essence of being human.
While our capacity to look backward in time, as stated earlier, is one of the characteristics that makes the human a being with awareness, for Veronese this act has even more sense, because history, to his way of seeing things, although composed of dates, has nothing whatsoever to do with age; and indeed, who would have imagined that Leonardo Pa Vinci's renowned Lady with a Canine has reached the ripe age of 5167.
Elena Forin