Gomma Magazine issue 2 - London
What we see in Piero's work is an impalpable and evanescent world, from which the only certainty we hold is the fact that it is a photograph we are looking at. This represents the whole meaning of his work. If it were a photomontage or a painting we wouldn't be as surprised, as touched. The fact that it is a photograph proves its contents to be true. Those shadows belong to the artist. He projects himself onto his photographs by remaining invisible, as if he were a ghost, and by doing this he accomplishes his vision.
Eugenio De Signoribus
from the catalogue "Piero Roi fotografie 1994-1999"
Translation of Alexander Coope
In considering the passage of a glance there is always a mystery when, suddenly capturing one’s own feeling, the external reflection of that feeling shades and flickers… and there, fixing its shot, tells you of your own life… As much more selective as it is more intense and necessary is the glance of Piero Roi: he does not restrict himself to reproduce as an example that which he sees or chooses to see, but interprets it, finding therein the closest correspondence up to the point of intervening in the image, so it may reflect, in its singularity, the complex purity of initial feeling… With this process that tends by its nature to exclude quantity and seriality, that which comes to light acquires a halo of the absolute and atemporal… The figure that passes on the background of old walls or crosses a threshold entering or leaving testifies to a journey, a presence just perceptible and nameable: it is a humanity made up of individual lives, which scene is like a lightening flash, almost as though stolen, and turned to render eternal the dream, the hopeless inconsistency… Does the house that stands out thus on a grey ground, or that fills the picture, contain life? … Rather it seems a life that was… Or perhaps: who could bring himself to live there? Who could worthily bring it to life?... All is silence… Outdoors, whether it is mirror or reflection, motionless air speaks of how an image may take away all vital signs up to breathing… and from there, backwards we return from the dead or the survivors to live in the houses in which we dwell. In the portrait the synthesis of the shot directly touches another life. The glance that knows or already feels that which the face, that face, contains in the shot comes to grips with a history that alone conveys a principle of acquaintance or draws back a fold or anticipates an end… This possibilty for perception is well exemplified in a poem by Giovanni Giudici titled “Looking at a photo by Paul C.” (in the volume: Evening Heresy) in which the poet, trying to reconstruct the temporal and existential time of Paul Celan, offers a happy synthesis from his point of view as a reader: - I dig in verse, I visit you in photography – Piero Roi, thus far negator of identity, when confronting the portrait (and particularly the portrait of poets) asks still more of himself and breaks down the distance from the other only when, through empathy and study, he can say – I visit you in verse, I dig in photography… - Among the innumerable sensations one may receive from his slender collection is that of one involved, able to capture a mystery in being and in things that can undoubtedly be credited to his quest, to the unsparing quality of an artist struggling with his own nature.
Gian Ruggero Manzoni
from: "Lo sguardo del mercenario" - 1997
Translation of Alexander Coope
The ‘mercenary’ (together with the ‘hired killer’, a character dear to me) besides his daring (becoming a free agent liberated from norms, and conformity, from those ‘well-to-do’ and ‘doing well’, usually at odds with daily life) is, literally, the supreme narrator of undertakings, whether part of life or lowlife. In the same way as the ‘betrayer’ (a figure about which Bonito Oliva theorized) but, I would say, with greater courage in laying himself open [esporsi a che cosa?], the ‘mercenary’ “acts!”, confronts the deed, sells himself (diabolically) to the highest bidder (an apt metaphor for post-modern man), paying in his turn (via a ‘cosmic’ individuality and the loneliness from thence derived) the sought after otherness and the transgressive choice that the skin indicates with its scars. The anti-ideological fascination (Late Romantic) which environs him is tinted with the blood and the sorrows of a real ‘loser’, one who with seeming coldness excludes himself from a system of reality that supports its being on restrictive laws (morals), injustices, convenience, hypocritical conventions and insincere relations. The sculpture of Paolo Tosti and the photography of Piero Roi, with relations and combinations, volumetric references, with reflections and interactions from the three to the two dimensional providing thickness and solidity to the narrative course to characters ultimately limited to an epic treatment, there bringing to an end the continual changes and those (poetically imagined) moments which are characterised as the ‘glance’, the view within and without. The solid durability (which I particularly appreciate) in the works of Tosti in which the quest for materials is united with a Spartan exigency in the most belligerent forms, finds its summing up in the symbolic-persuasive bright photos of Roi which one moment dwell in their turn on clear, decisive representations and the next give breath to a lyrical world peopled by diaphanous but observing female figures. The travel notebook of these two young artists is becoming engrossing, and could add up to the adventures of one who acts entrusting his balance/composure to the winds, to fire and iron, to barbaric plunder above all, to the targeted whistle (sharp and devastating) which calls to us from beyond the nullity of existence.