UMBERTO ROMAGNOLI
METONYMIES

Still lifes are dead natures and what still remains alive. Still life is what remains after the passage. It is the objects left behind that contain the stories, like ghosts they remain perpetual in their static motion to tell what has been and what could be. They assume a purely narrative and metaphorical language, severing the word. There is a call of life and death in the photographic series METONYMIES by Umberto Romagnoli, like the nail that recalls the cross of Christ, passion, pain, and suffering, to pass into the white of the egg shell ready to give light. In the burnt match, there is a trace of a completed action and the irreversibility of a consumed moment. There are echoes of seashells, of silent sounds enclosed. The black around is the abyss, which humans have within themselves and that contains them all. To show, as the etymology of the word ghost suggests, is what these still lifes do, which open the wounds and show what will remain of the human passage.

BACK TO GALLERY