Paolo Roversi at the MOP Foundation, born from doubt

Paolo Roversi was born in 1947 in the European city that houses the most luminous Byzantine monuments: in the basilicas of Ravenna, natural light interacts with tens of thousands of gold and glass tiles, creating very particular atmospheres that turn the visit into an experience open to spirituality. Coincidentally or not, the models that populate his photographs swarm around a shadow theateras this author refers to his Parisian workshop, where he works with the slowness that each image demands, always without rushing, convinced that beauty obeys only its own times. His sessions last hours or days and he rarely knows the fruits until after night; He prefers to let them marinate until he can review them with different eyes.

This summer, the Italian stars in “Doubts”, the new exhibition that the MOP Foundation of A Coruña offers to a fashion photographer: it is a tour of his entire career in which both his most famous images and some unpublished ones will come before us, taken while possible with his beloved Polaroid 8×10, in which he constantly discovered possibilities for experimentation. The exhibition is divided into nine sections that correspond to many other aspects of its aesthetics –Theatre, Appearances, Shadows, Doubts, People, Presence, Grace, Beauty and fading-, but, in reality, we can read them as a continuous frieze in which the artist allows himself to be carried away by doubt and research, certain that certainties close the door to creativity.

Paolo Roversi. Fading Paolo. Paris, 1984

Spain is a relevant place in Roversi’s career because it was here, in Seville and during a family vacation, as a child, where he took his first photograph: he captured a man dressed in black in front of a white wall, generating a diagonal shadow, and called it Sun and shadowin reference to the bullfighting environment of this city. It is not part of this anthology, but it is not missed too much considering the good number of anonymous individuals portrayed in this montage from A Coruña in almost identifiable snapshots, sharing the spotlight with celebrities and models who are anything but unknown. Some of these compositions were carried out in photo booths at street level, where even those most reluctant to allow themselves to be immortalized approached: they trusted, like Roversi himself, in the natural friendship that arises between those who observe and those who allow themselves to be analyzed; Both are, that brief time for each other, the center of the world.

That image, like almost all those that would come later, was born in any case from contemplation and silence; also the desire to introduce the dream and the unreal into his works, generally blurred, blurred or in saturated tones, as regular readers of headlines such as Vanity Fair, Marie Claire either Vogue. Larger brands such as Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Valentino have also had him.

This oneirism, and his love for a delicate intimacy, make viewers doubt whether they are looking at photographs or canvases, an impression supported by the photographer’s inclination towards chiaroscuro: he has come to work with flashlights in the dark to underline the emotional weight of his scenes and to paint his models white to turn them into timeless and evanescent beings. Thus, the technical and the artisanal converge in their processes.