Franco Vimercati (1940-2001) was a meticulous and essential artist, interpreter of the silent and repetitive nature of the real. His interest has always been directed to the analysis of everyday objects, like a bottle of mineral water, an electric iron, a tureen, and to the composition and decomposition of the scene, repeatedly assembled according to the need of the photographic eye.
But Vimercati’s work is not the photography of objects. Rather, it is the photography of events, of minimal and marginal metamorphoses, of occurrences that escape our control. Not a catalogue of things but an archive of time. It is not a matter of using the act of photography to perpetuate something that occurred once and is irreversible, but of dilating and multiplying the states of time, by which it is always necessary to start over. Without beginning or end. Without progression or interruption but as repetition of the pre-existing, continuous differences within the same. Can it be coincidence, then, that as distinguished an observer as Ghirri saw in Vimercati not solely the creator par excellence of “an endless, dilated time” but also a staunch supporter of “making the inanimate dynamic”?
This volume has been published on the occasion of the exhibition Franco Vimercati. Un minuto, curated by Marco Scotini at the Galleria Raffaella Cortese, Milan. It contains a large selection of his works and contributions by Paolo Fossati, Luigi Ghirri, Elio Grazioli, Javier Hontoria, Angela Madesani, Simone Menegoi and Marco Scotini.