Massimiliano Lattanzi (Rome, 1964) embarked on his exploration of the world of photography and visual research at an early age. Beginning with astronomy, from the observation of the stars, he has arrived, almost by chance, at the creation of his first lyrical, visionary and abstract images.

 

Following his studies in Literature and Philosophy, in the early 80s he put his camera at the service of his social involvement, both at national and international levels. By appointment of the Pontifical Institute for Foreign Missions (PIME) he put together “Bangladesh, Water Land” (Rome, 1989, 2nd ed. 1991), a photographic book that documents the social situation in Bangladesh, the revenues of which have been used in their entirety to fund schools, hospitals, and the reconstruction of the villages destroyed by the typhoon that hit the Bengal Gulf in 1991.

 

From this experience stemmed his decision to join the UN System, where he spent almost twelve years. Working in the domains of education, philosophy and ethics, he nevertheless did not abandon his photographic research.

 

In early 2004, he decided to devote himself entirely to his photographic and literary work, in which one recognizes a philosophical base that reveals an enquiry on the essence of being, on the various manners of understanding reality, on visual and emotive perceptions. This, in a constant dialogue between individuality and universality, between finite and infinity. In his work, the emotional impact of nature is communicated and amplified through a photographic medium that depicts clouds, aquatic series, dream-like landscapes, traces, skies, games of reflection and refraction. Thus giving birth to visual projects defined by the critics as “research of the pure instant”, “journeys into the undecipherable”, “capable of rendering otherwise unknown landscapes” or, simply, “visionary”.

 

Science and poetry, together with a game of decomposition-recomposition-abstraction, are the main ingredients of Istogrŕphika, a solo exhibition held in Palazzo Zorzi (Venice) from March to April 2005. It marks the beginning of this new phase of his work: reflected nets, suspended between air and water akin to mental projections, escort us throughout a path of “approach and loss” and “separation and recovery” of reality. Istogrŕphika was then exposed in Milan and Rome together with Imaginŕria, a meta-portfolio on the echo of sight, the persistence of vision, the experience of being, at once, nowhere and everywhere.

 

In 2006 the project AQVA took form. Its three constituent parts — Hydros, Athmos and Istos — are symbolic representations of the emanations of a primigenous Nature, where the intensity and ambivalence of the divine predominate. Taken as a whole, they become a metaphor, symbol of the encounter between humankind and spirituality. First in Paris, the show was then hosted in a number of museums in Mexico and Guatemala and became, subsequently, a travelling exhibit in various countries.

 

Now, in Athmochrňmić, games of light and the colours of the sky are transfigured through “a poetic eye capable of unveiling complexities hidden behind reality”.

 

Museum, galleries and numerous private collections have acquired his works.

 

 

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