“Beyond Silver”, in other words the best known photographic process.

So something beyond any such pretext as exactness, objectivity, truth, but also beyond any use of photography as a tool for seeing and being seen, for having a confirmation of the world and of oneself.

The show presents three generations of photographers, and a whole century of images and it concentrates more on their art and research interests than on their professional activity even though this was greatly influenced by these other interests. Our aim is to have a look at the magical ritual of ploys, poses, lights, chemicals and, above all, the way of looking of the photographers who manage to imbue their work with a subtle ambiguity. Their themes are the usual ones of photography: portraits, nudes, landscape, still-life. Except that these are filtered through with a marvellous fairytale-like atmosphere. This is not a question of “tearing away the veil” from the face or of deforming people and things but, rather, of wiping away suspicions and obscure traces (always well camouflaged by objective data).

It is as though various artists had followed the aim of what lies “elsewhere”. These photographs make us look “beyond” the photo in itself, search for what is not there, and guess at alternative possibilities, at the other face of the world.

This is the case of the clearly Futurist-inspired female “portrait” by Silvio Tommasoli (circa 1910) where the identity of the subject shifts in a play of superimpositions and conveys the idea that the image never ends, that it constructs a rotating space or even alludes to something else (a glass, a cup, or an amphora). And it is the case of the nude with a shell, circa 1950, by the brothers Filippo and Fausto Tommasoli, in which the figure of the woman is wrapped in a kind of veil which sucks her into it, almost as though to create a cohabitation (a “doublure”) with the shell and provoke within the image a “mise en abîme” effect.

But it is also so in more extreme cases: with his Scritture fotogrammiche, 1979 – 1991, Sirio Tommasoli enters inside the secret aspects of language and, through a series of imaginative combinations, provokes an elastic and unexpected vision; with Shadows, 1998, and her photo-performances, Alessandra Salardi gives a direct testimony of her being, of herself leaving behind her own trace on a photosensitive surface, almost as though to show the process itself of making the image.

We can say with certainty that an interpretation of the materials that go to make up the Tommasoli archives produces a continuous, impalpable mutation of their inner being: if we look at them carefully we capture a whole series of fragments, traces, sudden memories that passed from father to son in continuation.

In the work of all these artists there seems to open up a kind of precipice and there is an increase in an indefinable tension, as though pretence were on the point of breaking down and the gestures were some kind of obscure and mysterious acrobatics, rather like someone struggling to avoid the bullets of some invisible and unknown enemy. In other words, the photographic “eye” does not amplify the message and meaning of the pose by underlining its theatricality, but, instead, by following a prohibited path: one that mixes reality together with the imaginary or, rather, one that reveals the kind of hypocrisy that has no other aim than the pleasure of displaying itself.