As part of the MADE IN MAD event, promoted by the Comunidad de Madrid
The life of Madrid is shown from different points of view and lies somewhere between autobiography and reportage, with different levels of intensity and intimacy; the subjects are shown in their own lives with the streets and life of Madrid providing a backdrop full of energy and complexity.
Fabio Paleari lived in Madrid in the early 80s and late 90s, close to the lively cultural scene of the city and alongside the many artists and intellectuals who created the famous “movida”. These included the director Pedro Almodóvar, the actresses Rossy de Palma and Victoria Abril, the writers Camilo José Cela, Raimon Panikkar, Almudena Grandes, the visual artists Miquel Barcelò, Eduardo Chillida, Antoni Tàpies, Miguel Angel Campano, and flamenco characters like Camarón de la Isla, El Guito, Pepe Abichuela and Enrique Morente. The life of Madrid is shown from different points of view and lies somewhere between autobiography and reportage, with different levels of intensity and intimacy; the subjects are shown in their own lives with the streets and life of Madrid providing a backdrop full of energy and complexity. Both a faithful and touching tale of that time and a private emotional diary, this body of work bears witness to the atmosphere around the artists at work and at play in the Spanish capital.
I Won’t Give Up, Guido Costa Projects, Turin; Paris Photo, 2007; Bankrobber Gallery, London, 2008.
The Last Beat of Allen Ginsberg, Traffic Music Festival, Turin, 2007; Fondazione Piras, Asti, 2007; Galleria Seno e Forma, International Photography Centre, Milan; Guido Costa Projects, Turin, 2006.
My Boy Pete Doherty, Guido Costa Projects, Turin, 2006.
Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear, Trolley Gallery, Berlin 2006; Trolley Gallery, London, 2005.
The Leu Family, Guido Costa Projects, Turin, 2004; Selfridges, London – Palazzo Reale, Genoa, 2003.
FEAR, Guido Costa Projects, Turin, 2003.
Paradisi Artificiali, Photography Biennale, Turin, 2001.
Silicon, Galleria Seno, Milan, 2001.
Le Désiré du Maroc, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2000.
La Vergogna di Sentire la Colpa, Photography Biennale, Turin, 1999.
La Kashba di Marrakech, Galleria Seno, Milan, 1998.
Leda e il Cigno, Galleria Webwe & Weber, Turin, 1997.
La Mia Incapacità di Stare al Mondo, Galleria Weber & Weber, Turin, 1998; Galleria Seno, Milan, 1997; Museo Ludwig, Budapest, 1996.
Arte en España, Italian Cultural Institute, Madrid, 1992.
1000 Miglia, Italian Cultural Institute, Madrid, 1991.
I Won’t Give Up, Damiani Editore, Bologna, 2008.
La Mia Incapacità di Stare al Mondo, Shooting Book, Rome, 2008 (reprint).
The Leu Family, Trolley Book, London, UK, 2003.
La Goccia, Westzone Publishing, London, UK, 1999.
La Mia Incapacità di Stare al Mondo, Kaos Edizioni, Milan, 1996.
The angels of the night usually bring what’s needed. And then, it’s just about knowing where to look. Some faces appear tense and drawn. Others are simply focused on what they’re doing. They are actors, directors, artists, flamenco performers, or simply friends captured on the street. Dawn breaks through the portholes of a magical house that allows a 360-degree view. The light of day introduces a very young Pedro Almodóvar behind a camera. The atmosphere inside, however, is wrapped in the most secret corners of a thousand private stories. Here, the location is key. It is Madrid in the 80s and 90s that Fabio Paleari portrays through a nearly infinite series of shots and self-portraits. It’s hard to follow a single motif. A direction. A language. From these different installations and projections, photography takes on forms and rhythms similar to those caused by a continuous wave. Like the wake of a ship that, as long as it travels, regenerates itself continuously. Afterward, it ceases to exist, living only in the eyes of those who have observed it. For Fabio Paleari, photography is above all a mirror of life. In both the good and the bad. After all, in his visionary world, only the tremors count. Beautiful and ugly, right and wrong seem superfluous. They are unplanned feelings. What matters is the idea of going all the way. Collecting the darkness and then revisiting the light. Another day. Another wound. Another memory. Another photograph.
For Fabio Paleari, the act of seeing is a necessity that aligns with the breath of others. Entering stories to live them. And if, for us, writing about photography means referring to established and well-known categories, for our author, taking pictures is about drawing his own fate, taking a risk, and expanding, each time, the visual horizons of those around him who have the privilege of seeing the chaotic whole of his entire body of work.
Art history, philosophy, ethics, and aesthetics are canons impossible to recognize in this visual context. It’s as though the photographic specificity proposed by Fabio Paleari is able to provoke cascading reactions. This is the basis of his poetics. It’s about his ability to stir emotions.
You don’t understand everything, but you feel the freshness of curiosity. The transparency of ideas. The friction of contradictions. The avalanches of fear. The current of fragility and the stillness of sweetness.
Thus, it’s impossible to say that photograph looks like a painting. That report contains the epic of a novel because photography is always the result of a staged performance. Nothing is accidental. Everything is provoked. Searched for and wanted.
Of that time, he says: “What’s left with me is sensitivity in my hands. I’m not sure others will recognize themselves. But inside, it’s always me.”
Fabio Paleari is one of the few true crooners we have today in Italy, especially in photography. He is an artist who loves and knows how to tell stories, but with that extra quality that all true crooners possess, which distinguishes them from mere storytellers or professional journalists: empathy.
When you look at one of his photos, you immediately sense that he wasn’t there by chance, or worse, chasing after some project. He was there simply because he had to be, and he would have been there even without the camera. He was there because he was an active part of the story, of that particular story. Otherwise, he would have simply been elsewhere.
This is the ground where empathy is born, and it is precisely on this fine line between presence and absence that the eternal conflict between art and reportage plays out, alongside the long-standing, difficult question about the poetic content of photorealism.
Explaining in detail what this empathy is, is not easy: it is made of sensitivity, nurtured by experience, and entirely free of calculation. It is a sort of capricious innocence, fueled more by life than by art.
To possess it, one must be free from ulterior motives, interests, and any other motivation. Only then, at times, and absolutely unpredictably, does empathy emerge from the depths of the self, a bit like the sublime Kant speaks of.
In his many works, from time to time, Fabio Paleari manages to possess this magical eye. As a rule, it happens when he tells us stories that he has carried inside for years, without ever concluding them or fixing them in a defined form. Stories that develop in different settings with different protagonists, but in a certain way, they are deeply intertwined with each other, like chapters in a great coming-of-age novel.
Spain is one of these focal points, one of these recurring stories from which everything begins and everything ends. And not only because of the many years he spent on its soil—Madrid, Barcelona, Ibiza, and again Madrid—but for deeper reasons, connected to elective affinities and a certain spirit of the places, earthly and primordial, which has always animated Fabio’s inner landscapes. A spirit that can be found in all his photographs, whether taken in London, Lausanne, or Milan, in the faces of his subjects, and even in the architecture.
In these shots, in these stories, art, with its rituals, rules, and codes of behavior, comes later, almost imperceptibly.
And, believe me, that is not the most important thing.
