Great artists are often multifaceted and ever changing. They know how to employ the richness of their experiences in order to get our attention and to strike us deeply. From landscape photography to glamour photography, here Cristian Iacono offers a very interesting insight into the process of artistic creation.
Would you introduce yourself to our readers? What is your education and what has influenced your artistic vision the most?
My name is Cristian Iacono, I am 21 years old and I am a visual artist. I have started to take pictures when I was around 17 years old, in an amateur way and in a photographic domain quite different from the one where I work now – that is, the landscape domain.
As soon as I finished the high school, I started to study photography at the Accademia di belle Arti in Rome. I am still studying there and from this year, I have started to take part in some exhibitions as well. From 27th to 31st May, my works will be shown in Rome, at Tevere Art Gallery, and in the next months in Arles, Milan and Paris too.
My artistic vision has been surely influenced by two well-known photographs: Nicholas Fols and Siermond. After seeing their works, I started to experiment and I began to put subjects inside my landscape shots. At visual level, romantic paintings have also exerted a sort of influence on me.
We have noticed that you often draw your inspiration from song lyrics, books or movies. How did this creative process come into being? What are the greatest satisfactions it has given to you?
As I like to define it, it is a quite natural, unconscious process and I cannot explain it very well. I listen a sentence, I got lost in a landscape, I read a page from a book and then I started to see scenes, images. As I said, I remember that when I started to take pictures, I tried to put these landscapes images in connection with song lyrics. By trying, I began to put subjects in them. Gradually, I started to define a personal style.
During these years, I sometimes received messages from people who were struck by my photographs, after seeing them. It happened because they succeeded in grasping something about me that I wanted to hide behind the camera, or because they noticed something about themselves, they recognized themselves in something displayed by my pictures. The moment this event occurs represents for me the greatest satisfaction.
As Dickinson said:
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
I think this is exactly the point.
In your shots, we can recognise a strong influence due to a certain kind of glamour photography. How do you keep together this aspect with your predilection for open landscape photography?
As I said, when I started to take pictures, I committed myself to landscape photography. Later on, I started to explore by inserting subjects in my pictures because of some other photographers who worked on portraiture. In other words, I try to turn the inner world of characters into spaces.
Glamour photography is a very interesting field to me. Through it, one can convey messages, images, and sensations. I believe this is exactly the meeting point. I consider both glamour and landscape photography as two great means to charm, convey images and emotions; also, they go really well together.
Why did you choose “Purification” as series to introduce yourself before EIKON’s audience?
It has not been easy to pick up just one work, but I think this one mirrors my vision quite well.
How was this series born? What models played an important role in the artistic process? What are the main subjects?
I do not remember where I read, or heard, the following sentences saying:
My demons do not know how to swim
And
The soul is cleansed
I hence imagined this purifying bath where the subject, which is me – I think of all of my subjects as projections of myself –, was purified through this immersion in the sea.
The sea is often the subjects of my shots. It is a place I am especially linked to and it is the only place where I can really be happy. Maybe, it is exactly the proof that my “demons” do not know how to swim, and that they disappear in the proximity to the sea.
The concept of purification turned out to be more and more familiar to me.
While we are talking about this project and the relationship I have with the sea, another sentence comes to my mind. I read it during an exhibition, and it sounds like “I need sea to see”.
I always put my subjects, my reflections, in realities appearing to be beyond contingency, as they were autonomous realities able to highlight the message I want to convey. I like thinking of these realities as places of the soul and the psyche, without any human presence. A brilliant example: the huge expanse of the blue sea displayed in Purification.
As regards subjects, I always think of them as my reflections. When the work is over, I do no longer see the boy or the girl I decided to show at the beginning. Now, I just see myself, along with what I was experiencing at that moment in time.
I do not believe that I talk about the ones staying in front of my camera. On the contrary, I talk about myself! The ones staying in front of my camera lend themselves to talk about me, consciously or not.
Regarding the portraits Picasso made of her, Dora Maar said: “I have thousands of his portraits, he made thousands of them. Still, none of them is Dora Maar, they all are just Picasso” and also “I am the Weeping Woman, I am the green woman in the paintings of that genius, I am the idea itself of pain: mine, his, the pain of the whole world.”
I think these quotes make the idea of my modus operandi quite well.
What are the dominant themes of this series? What message(s) did you want to deliver to the audience? And what kind of audience do you imagine, generally speaking (and for this specific series)?
I wanted to talk about purification, about a cathartic bath, a bath to let go, and to re-emerge, and to look beyond.
The audience was a concept I did not think about, admittedly. First, because what pushes me to carry out my projects is a need, a necessity to throw out.
Taking pictures of my pain allowed me to bear it.
It also happens to me to carry out projects not by starting from sentences, movies, etc., but rather – let’s say – by “chance”. I feel like I have to do something; so, I organize myself in an approximate way, then I go there and I shoot. Maybe, I will find the common thread later. And when I find the common thread linking the pictures together, it can speak of me and of what I was experiencing at that moment more than I could have done on purpose.
I believe there is a strong unconscious factor in art. Therefore, even if there can be the hope that someone somehow finds oneself in your works, the audience is not the aim you have at the very beginning.
However, if I had to define, to imagine an audience, I would not think of the audience as a set of beholders. Rather, I would think of the audience as something related to a very personal exchange, a face-to-face exchange.
The Italian poet, Giuseppe Ungaretti, said that there could be truth or veracity in an artwork, only if that artwork was firstly a confession. And I think of my artworks as confessions.
Confession is such an intimate concept. Since it is connected with the concept of audience, I hence think of the audience/beholder as a single person more than as a group.