"A photograph has edges;
the world does not." – Stephen Shore
Arno Roncada doesn’t take photographs. He invents them. Pictures or fragments of perspective. Sceneries and landscapes. Initially, there were locations. For example, just around the corner or extremely far away. The kind of places you usually pass, thoughtlessly and innocently, until you are aware of them as photographs.
— When do we start watching usual things in an unusual way? Brecht’s and Guy Debord’s estrangement. Freud’s uncanny. Close to home and yet frighteningly unreachable. The “everyday” escapes our attention and asks us to look the other way, so wrote Georges Bataille. When something seems ordinary, when it is imperceptible or unperceived – part of the furniture –, that is precisely the moment when it is worthwhile to return and look closer. This surely is one of the interpretations or possibilities offered by the “location” pictures of Arno Roncada.
This is possible because he is not an indifferent photographer. He does not adhere to the ”anything goes” principle, which has been ruling the photographic world to a large extent for years now. More and more photographers have come to believe in a spatial nihilism, writes Dirk Lauwaert in his recent book Lichtpapier (Light paper). People do not “leave” anymore, but are always “on their way.” They do not give any form to space, but pass through as a distance between two points. That is how their pictures contend with the negation of the spot. They photograph space as an escape path, as an evacuation corridor, as a transit zone. —
Arno Roncada too has photographed such transitional locations, but not en passant. In fact, he already had the picture in mind before the spot presented itself. Furthermore the titles he systematically gives to each work reveal this. And when such a location coincides with his thinking of a particular moment, he stops there. He literally takes the time to give form to a space; to show us in full what there is to see and – if possible – what he himself thought to see.
In Prop, for instance, we see thrice illuminated, a raster of black squares in different intensities, some type of rack, part of stage property in residual light. Or: daylight is shining into an empty space through lace curtains from the right side. A schematic pattern in yellow lines is outlined on the messy grey floor. Inter as a memory or an omen of a drastic change?
Deep blue wall-to-wall carpeting is part of a modern standard hotel interior. Half of the bed has been folded out from a Murphy Bed, revealing a growing blood-red stain on a white mattress. Is Untitled (Murphy Bed) referring to a crime scene in a prototypical hotel room? Or is it about the remarkable gradient of yellow? Model on the other hand offers an inconceivable assemblage of insulating material and ceiling tiles hanging loose. Could this be a schematic presentation of an unknown planetary
the world does not." – Stephen Shore
Arno Roncada doesn’t take photographs. He invents them. Pictures or fragments of perspective. Sceneries and landscapes. Initially, there were locations. For example, just around the corner or extremely far away. The kind of places you usually pass, thoughtlessly and innocently, until you are aware of them as photographs.
— When do we start watching usual things in an unusual way? Brecht’s and Guy Debord’s estrangement. Freud’s uncanny. Close to home and yet frighteningly unreachable. The “everyday” escapes our attention and asks us to look the other way, so wrote Georges Bataille. When something seems ordinary, when it is imperceptible or unperceived – part of the furniture –, that is precisely the moment when it is worthwhile to return and look closer. This surely is one of the interpretations or possibilities offered by the “location” pictures of Arno Roncada.
This is possible because he is not an indifferent photographer. He does not adhere to the ”anything goes” principle, which has been ruling the photographic world to a large extent for years now. More and more photographers have come to believe in a spatial nihilism, writes Dirk Lauwaert in his recent book Lichtpapier (Light paper). People do not “leave” anymore, but are always “on their way.” They do not give any form to space, but pass through as a distance between two points. That is how their pictures contend with the negation of the spot. They photograph space as an escape path, as an evacuation corridor, as a transit zone. —
Arno Roncada too has photographed such transitional locations, but not en passant. In fact, he already had the picture in mind before the spot presented itself. Furthermore the titles he systematically gives to each work reveal this. And when such a location coincides with his thinking of a particular moment, he stops there. He literally takes the time to give form to a space; to show us in full what there is to see and – if possible – what he himself thought to see.
In Prop, for instance, we see thrice illuminated, a raster of black squares in different intensities, some type of rack, part of stage property in residual light. Or: daylight is shining into an empty space through lace curtains from the right side. A schematic pattern in yellow lines is outlined on the messy grey floor. Inter as a memory or an omen of a drastic change?
Deep blue wall-to-wall carpeting is part of a modern standard hotel interior. Half of the bed has been folded out from a Murphy Bed, revealing a growing blood-red stain on a white mattress. Is Untitled (Murphy Bed) referring to a crime scene in a prototypical hotel room? Or is it about the remarkable gradient of yellow? Model on the other hand offers an inconceivable assemblage of insulating material and ceiling tiles hanging loose. Could this be a schematic presentation of an unknown planetary
system? Those who have ever seen the science fiction film Close Encounters until the very end, possibly perceived in the backlit mountain something more than a fluorescent green diorama kind of model.
The pictures of Arno Roncada are – in changing gradations – already pre-constructed, invented – and pre-visualized – from a mix of instinctive ideas, critical considerations and rational models, existing or not. There is only a location, a moment, yet it isn’t just a sampling or an archaeology of an empty space, but an idea that seeks to be bitten.
In such a way, locations are found or sometimes even literally personally constructed. In Double, for instance, a new space is created through a double exposure forming a dominant central perspective. And the work Fault trace is a pure construction and represents his pictorial vocabulary : the tension between possibility and impossibility, between fake and real, the moment in time and duration, the crystal-clear illuminated spot and space nearly merging into the fog. Coincidence is curtailed. Finally, the literal interpretation of the title Fault trace suggests something else than the geological concept: tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface pushing across each other so that fault traces come into existence.
A number of full-blown mountainscapes are added to the locations and constructions as counterpoint and offer breathing space at the same time. These Gran turismo pictures also depart, in principle, from the existing possible reality (the volcano Etna, the Alps...), but soon make clear that that is not the point. Merely the very diversity of formal variations – from graded rock foregrounds in pastelcolours and postcard aerial pictures through quasi-informal abstractions – indicate that these pictures want to lead their own lives passing by the concrete spot. This recalls the end of the eighteenth century in which for artists ‘the landscape’ did not really exist. The idealized mountains of William Turner or Caspar David Friedrich have nothing to do with the Pyrenees or the Alps. These artists were working by the motto “le paysage est un état d’âme” (the landscape is a state of heart and soul). With his modern version of “le sentiment de la montagne” (the sentiment of the mountains), Arno Roncada once more adds – accurately, dimensionally stable and not without any irony – a prolific extension to his arsenal of invented pictures. His ‘fault trace pictures’.
With few exceptions there are no people in the works of Arno Roncada: the magisterial illuminating arm of Lara, for instance, or the tiny figures running along the edge of the volcano in Gran turismo I. But are there really people in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich? Or are these figures only there to look – backwards – into (or out of) the picture together with us? Just like a mirror waiting for its reflection.
-- Erik Eelbode
The pictures of Arno Roncada are – in changing gradations – already pre-constructed, invented – and pre-visualized – from a mix of instinctive ideas, critical considerations and rational models, existing or not. There is only a location, a moment, yet it isn’t just a sampling or an archaeology of an empty space, but an idea that seeks to be bitten.
In such a way, locations are found or sometimes even literally personally constructed. In Double, for instance, a new space is created through a double exposure forming a dominant central perspective. And the work Fault trace is a pure construction and represents his pictorial vocabulary : the tension between possibility and impossibility, between fake and real, the moment in time and duration, the crystal-clear illuminated spot and space nearly merging into the fog. Coincidence is curtailed. Finally, the literal interpretation of the title Fault trace suggests something else than the geological concept: tectonic plates beneath the earth’s surface pushing across each other so that fault traces come into existence.
A number of full-blown mountainscapes are added to the locations and constructions as counterpoint and offer breathing space at the same time. These Gran turismo pictures also depart, in principle, from the existing possible reality (the volcano Etna, the Alps...), but soon make clear that that is not the point. Merely the very diversity of formal variations – from graded rock foregrounds in pastelcolours and postcard aerial pictures through quasi-informal abstractions – indicate that these pictures want to lead their own lives passing by the concrete spot. This recalls the end of the eighteenth century in which for artists ‘the landscape’ did not really exist. The idealized mountains of William Turner or Caspar David Friedrich have nothing to do with the Pyrenees or the Alps. These artists were working by the motto “le paysage est un état d’âme” (the landscape is a state of heart and soul). With his modern version of “le sentiment de la montagne” (the sentiment of the mountains), Arno Roncada once more adds – accurately, dimensionally stable and not without any irony – a prolific extension to his arsenal of invented pictures. His ‘fault trace pictures’.
With few exceptions there are no people in the works of Arno Roncada: the magisterial illuminating arm of Lara, for instance, or the tiny figures running along the edge of the volcano in Gran turismo I. But are there really people in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich? Or are these figures only there to look – backwards – into (or out of) the picture together with us? Just like a mirror waiting for its reflection.
-- Erik Eelbode
