Vida Detenida: Pedro Almodóvar’s images for the primary time in Italy

“Vida Detenida,” the photographic exhibition by Pedro Almodóvar, Spain’s most famed and controversial director and Golden Lion winner on the newest Venice Film Festival, shall be displayed at Il Meccanico in Verona throughout the Grenze Arsenali Fotografici Festival. After Wim Wenders’ images, the Verona area hosts a part of the venture introduced a couple of years in the past on the Marlborough Gallery in Madrid as a part of the PhotoEspaña competition.

The exhibition – curated by Simone Azzoni – is a collection of nonetheless lifes. Some come from his movies (“Pain and Glory”), others from private home intimacies. All photos are “Vida Detenida”: not precisely a nonetheless life, however a ready for all times, a frozen life, suspended in a light-weight of calm on a regular basis life. The artist declares: «I want the English expression ‘still life,’ that means immobile life, as an alternative of ‘naturaleza muerta’ (lifeless nature), because it’s stated in Spanish. Objects are at all times alive, as is mild, within the sense that they’re prone to the passage of time». The choice on show is a tribute to Zurbarán, Morandi and Ettore Sottsass, from whom the director appears to attract deep inspiration. Each {photograph} options fruit, vegetation or ornamental components from his residence. The regular and bizarre, fruit and objects dialogue on “secular altars” as Almodóvar defines them: «Still lifes are a pagan type of altar that reveres and venerates objects». Stages and units, windowsills and cabinets are all one for contemplation and marvel.

Anonymous vases and souvenirs, design and craftsmanship, are transfigured earlier than the digital camera lens. «To begin photographing at residence and be captured by the observe, it’s essential to really feel alone», the director recounts. «It’s solely in these moments that one manages to have a look at the sunshine coming into by the kitchen window and be absorbed by the spectacle to the purpose of taking a digital camera in hand and making an attempt to seize that second and its mild». “Vida Detenida” celebrates pure aesthetics, with out goal, with out measure and with out boundaries outlined by genres or historical past. Looking at a flower because it withers, or a vase in entrance of {an electrical} outlet is to flee the elegy that takes pleasure in pop or kitsch. The poetry of want additionally disappears, the rhetoric of stoic acceptance as a result of the banal is just not banal, the easy is just not easy, the acquainted is unsettling.

This home nonchalance {of electrical} retailers, window frames, house backgrounds that peek by amongst totemic objects, souvenirs, remnants of cinematic wunderkammer, are cuts of time that break the erotic bond, the sensual satisfaction with the chromatic pulp of issues. We are in the identical residences as his movies, however every little thing is silent. Ellipses of locations, metonymies of areas, Almodóvar takes us contained in the resonances with different figures, different units. The classicism of nonetheless life, crossed by distractions, deconstructs itself within the mixtures of private, subjective, objectual, synthetic, common, singular destinies. Just consider the reminiscence sedimented on objects, what in use has made them such.

«These images are usually not post-produced. What pursuits me is the ecstasy of the second, being vigilant and capturing the emotion of the moment». A post-modern through which the body-object goes in the hunt for the soul, lastly free of pulsional power. «This is pop: elevating the on a regular basis components we stay with and which have a sensible perform to the class of creative mannequin», Almodóvar wrote. As in his cinema, issues reveal themselves by stunning us. Having misplaced the nice narratives and the facility of archetypes, colours and varieties grow to be enigmas able to reworking the intimacy of relationships between us, between us and issues, within the time of a flash shielded from the world.

«I hope this emotion stays within the framed picture, however for me it’s actually enough that these images are ornamental, that they accompany their house owners, that they stay with them and bear witness to their life». The catalog is printed by Lazydog, textual content translations are by Maria Serafini, with coordination by Francesca Marra of Grenze Arsenali Fotografici and Giuseppe Ceroni of PepArtist. The works on show are on mortgage from Opera Gallery in Madrid.

Info:

Vida Detenida: la fotografia di Pedro Almodóvar
20/09/2025 – 20/10/2025
Tuesday to Sunday 9:30-12:30 | 16:00-19:00
Il Meccanico
Via San Vitale 2b – Verona
www.grenzearsenalifotografici.com/il-meccanico

---