Luca Rossini & Maura Manfredi (Italy)
Photographer & Visual Artist
Luca Rossini : Photography to Luca Rossini is not a way to document reality, but more the way in which he can suspend reality, with all its physical and societal rules, and turn everything into his own dream version. he works with complex and low lights, both in studio and outdoors. Luca's favorite subjects are portraits which tell dream-like stories; places which seem daydream scenarios; and surrealistic concepts created in his studio.
His view over the world has been seriously affected by “dreamers” like David Lynch, David Cronenberg, and Federico Fellini, with their ability to transmit the distinct and uncomfortable feeling of not being really awake.
Luca comes from the analog days of the dark room, but his stylistic growth is very digital. he spent most of his life struggling to confine his artistic nature, so he achieved a PhD in biomedical engineering. It didn’t work, nothing works, there’s no cure against the urge to create and communicate, he guesses.
Maura Manfredi was born in Rome where after having completed classical studies, she graduated in communication science in 2002 with a thesis in which she analyze from sociological point of view the Net-Art and the creative processes in network.
During the university years she studied painting and sculpture at Rome University of Fine Arts with the masters Tullio De Franco and Alessandra Porfidia.
She attend the painting course and multimedia communication of the professor
Francesco Delli Santi and Donatella Landi, working on personal projects and carrying out several studies and video installations.
Maura has worked as a digital artist for various companies in the film industry and with independant artists, simultaneously bringing forward the modeling study with the maestro Nino Mandrici.
In 2012 with Luca Rossini, a collective project X / Y PROJECT.
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Artworks
x/y project
X/Y The X/Y PROJECT isn’t really easy to define, maybe because its very definition is left somehow open to the interpretation of each of its participants. The original idea’s seed was to give a chance to anybody to be part of a work of art and, to do so, to make the latter modular and repeatable. An infinitely long dinner table has been chosen for this purpose, and we decided to have it photographed from two perspectives, one frontal and one from above. The two perspectives introduce other dissimilarities, spatial and temporal, not only in the furniture and in the subject’s costume, but also in the frontal image depicting the “beginning” of the dinner, and the one from above showing the “end” of it.
The scenario brings along as many dichotomous concepts, such as order-chaos, good-evil, life-death, apparent-hidden, truth-lie, as religious symbolisms, like the last supper, the human and the godly perspective, and the free will.
So, what’s the X/Y PROJECT? It’s a visual research, from a symbolic and iconographic viewing point, of the innerly dichotomous nature of the human being, constantly hanging the balance in the precarious equilibrium between order and chaos, good and evil, life and death. And it is an open and collaborative research, meaning that each participant brings his or her own interpretation of this concept, meditating on his or her dichotomies as if they were the “soul’s cartesian axes” and from there picturing how his/her life and body would look like at the most dramatic extremes of such axes.
This means that every shot comes with a true and personal story, deeply human in its very nature. These stories will be collected, together with the shots, in this blog for as long as there will be participants willing to share their view on the concept and to be pictured in it, becoming part of an open, collaborative, and potentially extremely alive work of art. You’re all invited, of course!
Exhibition
