Curated by Paola Lasalandra

Creative direction: Irakli Nassidzé 

The photographic exhibition "Poets, Masks, Actors, Ghosts" (photographs 1962-2011)  is a journey through the life and works of Mario Lasalandra. A retrospective of the internationally renowned Venetian artist. Around 150 vintage black and white vintage prints guide us through 20th-century Italy with a style Lasalandra himself defines as "Magical Surrealism." Mario Lasalandra is considered one of the most innovative and brilliant figures in Italian photography. Photographer, artist, and painter, Lasalandra recounts learning his first rudiments of light and composition from Giambattista Tiepolo and the altarpiece of Saint Thecla in the Este Cathedral, near his childhood home. He also credits the cinema of directors Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Ingmar Bergman, and Pasolini as influences. 

And because Mario Lasalandra is a photographer who wanted to be a director but wouldn't sacrifice his family to move to Cinecittà, he pours his magical imaginary world made of beauty, craftsmanship, poetry, simple figures, and a surreal and evocative atmosphere into the staging of his "Il Magico" (The Magic). Lasalandra directed this event for 11 editions starting in 2003 in San Felice sul Panaro (Modena), with the enthusiastic participation of an entire community. For one day, the local population transform into his "characters," bringing to life fairytale presences that provide true inspiration for photographers and lovers. 

Born in 1933 in Este, on the southern edge of the Euganean Hills, Mario Lasalandra inherited the studio of his maternal grandfather, Federico Tuzza, a painter and photographer, in the 1950s. After experimenting with painting, he discovered photography in 1962 and held his first solo exhibition with the photo essay Journey to Egypt. The serene environment of the Euganean Hills, where he lives, and the profound silences of the Venetian countryside craft the magical impressions emanating from his photographs. He soon began to alternate commercial work with original research, photographing clownish characters in desolate settings, clearly influenced by Fellini's early films (La Strada, Nights of Cabiria). The scenes become increasingly complex, and Lasalandra begins to construct fantastical stories that, though lacking strict dramatic coherence, are full of evocations and references to figures from modern mythology. Thus, were born his celebrated series: Judgment (1967), Scarecrows (1968), Filodrammatici (Dramatic Players) (1968), and  Chronicle of a Drama (1970), populated by suggestive hosts of angels, virgins, prophets, masks, actors, and ghosts. These are unsteady figures, manifesting through their precarious balance the instability of an era in which photography in Italy is undergoing a deep and irremediable crisis. At the same time, these figures are nourished by a relationship with history from - the daguerreotype to August Sander, from David Bailey to Diane Arbus - in an extraordinarily original way, offering an incessant and still inexhaustible variety of types and situations. These figures make Mario Lasalandra one of the most innovative and brilliant artists of contemporary photography. 

Paolo Morello: Photography historian, photographer, publisher, collector, and gallery owner. Author of many fundamental studies on the history of photography in Italy, including Lasalandra "Poets, Masks, Actors, Ghosts."