"piazza (piscina comunale) #1"

instant photography (Polaroid impossible)

Andrea Tonellotto and the polaroid
An idea, a well-defined project, clear both for the subject and for the tools to be used. A rigorous realization carried out with the utmost care. The search for essentiality, the structures dedicated to man, the absence of man as actor, but his presence as designer, as user, are evident. The light, or more often the shadows, geometric figures, abstract figures, which contrasts can be captured through these images! Andrea leads us by the hand into a real and at the same time abstract world, he guides us where the border between reality and vision is very blurred, he exploits the solid walls to take us towards the void. He forces us to look for a glimmer upwards, to escape from the prisons we have built for ourselves, to free our imagination. Positive or negative interpretation? To each his own, I am optimistic, Andrea tries to warn us, to urge us to become aware, cities and factories are closing us in narrow spaces. He doesn't propose a solution, we can accept to stay or decide to leave, remain prisoners or free ourselves, go to the countryside, to the mountains, to the sea, to wider spaces, cleaner air. Maybe that's where everyone has already gone!
Andrea does not offer the solution, nor does he suggest it. The objective of his Polaroid simply makes an investigation and does it with detachment, with rigorous professionalism. The use of the medium, the devices for the immediately developed films, far from representing a limitation, allows the rigorous approach. There is no fiction, no manipulation, there seems to be no interpretation either. On the contrary, it is precisely the choice of the medium that defines its interpretation, a medium that does not allow modifications, that is "pure" and therefore represents reality as he has seen it, as he wants us to see it. The research, even spasmodic, of the purity of the lines, of the composition, of the balance between planes and masses, proposes us a world that seems, instead, unreal, and only the consideration that we are dealing with devices and films with immediate development, by definition not falsifiable, brings us back to a reality, tangible, that only attentive eyes and a good sensitivity allow us to see and capture.
(Beppe Bolchi, 2011)