Colourful atmospheres, unlimited spaces, cosmic breath. In Athmochròmiæ an uncommon perspective dominates the images, capturing aspects that are invisible to an inattentive perception. It is a poetic vision, which unveils colours, places and sounds that, otherwise, would remain imperceptible.

In his photographs, Massimiliano Lattanzi calls out to individual interiority; an interiority that each of us unconsciously projects upon the world. Thus, suddenly, skies are no longer skies: shades of clouds, the refraction of light, the deep abysses of shadows, or the blinding reflection of the sun, all of which are instantaneously transfigured, losing any reference to a material dimension and assuming the shape of pure abstraction. An abstraction, which at first removes us from physical entities, then returns us to them with a new awareness.

One has the faint impression that these are clouds in movement, slowly metamorphosising before one’s eyes. A universe in dissolution: a constant state of change that transforms empirical objects into a frenzy of controversial emotions. Little by little the eye loses itself in the atmospheres created by the artist: what one is looking at becomes unreal, undefined, subjugated by a profound, intimate, silence. At times immense — of a Michelangelesque magnificence — at others more personal and private, this ‘non-space’ allows one to float in a light-hearted and peaceful manner; or seduces one into losing oneself in the gloomy depths of an horizon, which may sometimes look tumultuous, but is never harmful.

To achieve this effect, the artist recedes: he does not tell the viewer “how” to react or “what” to see within his images. He does not reveal anything about himself (although one cannot forget that any artistic work tells a story about its creator). On the contrary, he is an almost imperceptible presence, intentionally concealed behind the shades, behind the colour, behind the ensuing emotion, which becomes universal, infinite; for it springs from the inexhaustible sequence of perceptions that are those of the beholders.

It is thus of no importance to ask questions about the nature of the skies, or when in his life the artist depicted them. That lonely cloud hit by a sun ray that renders it fluorescent against the profound indigo of the sky; those blue veins like streaks engraved onto a pinkish backcloth; that mousse that resembles the boiling waves of the sea; or those colours that blend into one another suggesting epiphanies of diaphanous phantoms… All of these images become the absolute paradigm of a spacelessness which, intimately filled by achrony, welcome each and every one of us, our silences, our thoughts, our being. A being which, at once, is and is not; is conscious and no longer is; almost mesmerised, rapt, in a perennial recursive game of absence and persistence.

— Nicoletta Consentino

http://www.massimilianolattanzi.com/ATHMOCHROMIAE