A Spasso
Luca Massaro

Dizionario Vol. 1 (Art Paper Editions, 2023) is the first in a series of encyclopedic collections of words photographed by Luca Massaro over the past ten years. This archive of more than a thousand photos of words constitutes the raw material for his site-specific installations, such as the one here in Biel/Bienne. His three-dimensional visual poems gleaned from here and there are turned flat by being photographed; he then prints them by hand on unprimed linen canvases. By combining a medium often used in classical painting with an electronic printing method using a special mix of inks he created in his studio, Massaro creates a one-off hand-made abstract image, like the reverberation of a word beyond the concept. Ut pictura poesis is a Latin expression that means “As is painting, so is poetry”; nowadays we would say, “An image is worth a thousand words.” In a time of ubiquitous photography and the disappearance of writing, of mimetic and memetic representations, Massaro’s work is a portrait of the conflicting hybridization of iconotexts.

Year of production: 2024

In collaboration with Federica Chiocchetti and the Musée des Beaux-Arts Le Locle (MBAL)