The possibilities of attention and inspection are known to everyone. Normally, we occupy a space in the world and create within it coordinates that, only after a certain projection work, we can define as ours or personal. Through these procedures, we establish our presence and orientation. In an environment perceived as inhospitable, all this fails, and we discover a decidedly more uncomfortable reality, as horror films and works that dwell on disorientation show us.

We experience all this very easily when we traverse a path in the dark. Fabio Lo Re’s works focus precisely on this, on the attempt to organize a minimal existence within the inhospitable. These works are created in darkness, but they would probably have the same formation if set underwater or in a space without atmosphere: they are attempts to find references in the world, coordinates for life.

The light that serves as a sounding line is, of course, reason. But if the interchange between environment and impression is fundamental for creating consciousness (the so-called feedback, essential in the world of signs), it should be noted that the world outside is rather chilling for Fabio Lo Re: the artifacts that the light-gaze discovers along its trajectories often come from the East and from a completely artificial world. This means that the subject in their first perceptions is completely bewildered, lacking the tools to understand. They are exotic to themselves.

It is remarkable that in one of the first works created in this way there are multiplied eyes. But if our gaze is not reciprocated, it is guilty to have launched it. If we encounter arms open to nothing, monkeys or satyrs (in photographs not present), it is evident that the work itself warns us: we are engaging with an offering, a mimicry, or a grotesque without outcomes. Our gaze is not reciprocated, so we are forced to create alternative visual and orientational maps for pollinating the world with our presence. This is a set of cognitive/existential operations whose outcome is not always happy, otherwise maladaptation would not exist. Fabio Lo Re’s works tell us that this process must be elaborated and conquered day by day. A small light is born from a great night.

Paolo Aita

All images are digital photographs entirely created during shooting (pose b and use of small LED lights), without any subsequent digital editing of any kind.

The works created between 2013/14 are digital prints on Fine Art paper measuring 50X75 cm, mounted on a matte black wooden box frame of 67X92 cm.