Silvio Wolf. Present Perfect

It is not about the way things are,
but about the way you see them.

Silvio Wolf’s exhibition Present Perfect explores the special nature of the photographic image as a Threshold, particularly in regard to its experiential and conceptual implications. In all the works exhibited the relationship between work and glance is fundamental, so that vision and meaning become variables of one single path that places the Subject actively at the centre of the work. Phenomenic reality and beholder’s glance merge onto the photographic surface, the place of coincidence between temporal and perceptual fluxes that are complimentary and distinct from each other: a symbolic field that joins and separates, offering identity to both.

As the artist says: “I am interested in the Reality of the Image, that which is charged with meaning in the present time of experience: it is, as it happens. The work pertains to the individual and to his awareness: the artist is the medium between Reality and Subject. The image is a vibrating threshold between elsewhere and present, the invisible underlies the visible: images are its symbolic forms of interpretation.

Aware that the bulimic condition resulting from the excessive consumption of images is producing a radical impoverishment of our visual experience, to the point that their overexposure is causing an incipient inability to see, Wolf’s work suggests instead to slow down and listen, shifting the attention from the referent, reduced by now to a distant background noise of retinal vision, towards the Subject: He-She who sees. All the works exhibited lead us to shift our attention from the time and space of the shot to the hic et nunc of He-She who comes to terms with the actuality of the work. The present time of viewing, the place in which this happens, reveals the meaning of the gaze, offering a new horizon of interpretation for thinking on Photography.

The gallery space is conceived as one visual and experiential path through the stations of as many bodies of work, open to reflect on the appearance of the image and the way in which it manifests itself: its presentation, rather than representation of an experience –elsewhere – in time and space, is the unifying vision of Present Perfect.

This active quest for a strongly subjective relationship between the glance and the image develops seamlessly through the apparently abstract colour fields of Horizons, symmetrically presented in the firsts two rooms; the reflective surfaces of Mirror Thresholds and the self-illuminating one of Meditation in the intimacy of the third room; in the end with the new semi-reflective and interactive series Shivah in the fourth room, conceived as a surprising project room completing the entire journey of the show.

Silvio Wolf (1952) lives and works in Milan and New York.

He studied Philosophy and Psychology in Italy and Photography and Visual Arts in London, where he received the Higher Diploma in Advanced Photography at the London College of Printing.

From 1977 to 1987 he used photography to explore the laws, language and two-dimensional nature of the image. His work has moved in directions different from those of tradition, which favoured the documentary and narrative value of the photographic image. Instead, he has pursued a more subjective and metaphorical view of reality. In this period he made polyptychs and large-format works which have been shown in Italy and abroad, including New Image, in 1980, in Milan, Aktuell ‘83 in Munich and Documenta VIII, in 1987, in Kassel.

From the end of the 1980s to the present he has gradually introduced new languages in his work, using the moving image, still projections, light and sound, either individually or in combinations.

Many of his bodies of work have moved away from the pure two-dimensional format of photography to involve architectural space and the places in which he’s asked to operate, creating multimedia projects and sound installations. In his site-specific projects, as in all his photo-based work, the issues of Threshold, Absence and Elsewhere are always central.

He has created temporary and permanent installations in galleries, museums and public spaces in Belgium, Canada, England, France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Luxembourg, Spain, Switzerland and the United States. In 2009 he was invited to participate in the 53rd Venice Biennale.

He teaches Photography at the Visual Arts Department of the European Institute of Design in Milan, and is Visiting Professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.