Title Nicola Bettale - New Projects
Date Permanent Show
Adrress on PhotoArts.com - fine Art Photography


Exhibition by Nicola Bettale on PhotoArts.
Established in 1997 PhotoArts is a impressive showcase dedicated to Fine Art Photography which is based in New York. The site benefits from an excellent reputation, credibility and it is a top five Google ranking for "fine art photography".

The exhibition displayed now on the home page will stay indefinitely on the PhotoArt's archive.

PRESS RELEASE
Nicola Bettale - New Projects
curator James Wintner/PhotoArts

PhotoArts is pleased to present the latest projects of Nicola Bettale, a young Italian photographer who brings to his work an exacting philosophical investigation and an ambitious program for employing photography to bring to the viewer a renewed understanding of the culture that surrounds him.

At PhotoArts we are constantly in search of new and adventurous approaches to the art and ambitions of photography and Nicola's work succeeds on both levels.

In his words:

"By sublimating its own identity, my subject becomes the universal mouthpiece of a blurred, hinted or just suggested conceit. A conceit aware that its content is preceded by a consciousness that no definite interpretation will ever exist.  A conceit that leaves the doors of its meaning open both inwards and outwards"

As we dissect this thick serving of ambiguity and arrogance we confront the desire of an artist to dissolve the mechanisms of ordinary perception into their most humble parts; then, to re-assemble these parts into new constructions that dare to present themselves as the thing itself. But their meaning is elusive and it is our job to conspire in this act of reconstruction; always at risk of mistaking the parts for the thing itself, or the new structure as a coherent object with its own identity.

Of course, it is none of these things - and all. Our gaze is never settled or resolved. Color and shape transport us on a journey through a landscape that the photographer has imagined on our behalf. We are complicit companions on a voyage that does not have a home port. We are saturated in abstract beauty that has been confected from the most ordinary circumstances. The old is new; the new is transformed; our minds are freed from its conventions and we float through a new landscape of perception, meaning and emotion.

Power lines, the moon, plastic bottles. Who knew that such aesthetic content could be pulled from them. Or, can it? Is that the conceit the artist announces? Or is it our conceit, the tightly held conviction that what we see is all that can be known of reality?

Nicola Bettale's photos challenge the conceits of our habitual way of seeing with the artist's conceits of a higher order of seeing. I, for one, was very happy to take that challenge and survive it with my imagination refreshed and my seeing transformed.