Lost shadows. Marco Rigamonti.

In the Camargue, Marco Rigamonti encountered a primal world, water and earth embracing their intensities under a sky of pure light. The landscapes he contemplates are silent. Man has passed through there, who will disappear faster than the shape of the places. Perceiving the correspondences between the artifacts and the territory that supports them, the photographer approaches space as one breathes it, calmly, lungs filling with air, then emptying.
His images are thus stripped of facile affects or sentimentality, psychology most often being a barrier between the viewer and the scenes he receives. In the land of the herds, Marco Rigamonti offers a journey into the ochre and grace of all presence, between the lightening of the self and very ancient solemnity. There is in his rectangles of vision gravity, but also absurdity and spontaneous humor, without mockery.
The moving intimacy of things meets the absurd, or the incongruous, and the brilliance of the truth of what is, simply bathed in sunlight, the malice of the spectator. We enter his photographs as we enter an arena without knowing where the animal will come from that we will have to face in a combat more spiritual than physical. The signs of Camargue culture are shown, between the feeling of survival of the ethos of a people and the surprise of its advent.
If we perceive idleness here, it is not in the sense of vice that our grandmothers deplored, and the busybody of the Spectacle turning endlessly in the void, but in the sense of the concern for the self of the Ancients, this wisdom in the approach to time and bodies thrown into impermanence. It is a waiting without drama under the warm breeze, or the leaden rays, an awareness of the maturation necessary for each entity - vegetable, animal, human - to reach its end by developing the best of its juice.
Marco Rigamonti has photographed a French Far West that is both funny and wild, open to all beings who have managed to preserve their share of indocility, their freedom, their touch of madness. The Camargue that he reveals, dry and covered in seminal water, is a power, a friendly kingdom for solitary people, a desert where one can face the Grim Reaper head-on. In the dialogism of his images, a garden hose is much more than a line of rubber snaking through the sand; it is also, in the secret conversation of shapes, the archway overlooking a fountain under construction, the rail of a ghost train, or the delicious curve of a slide.
While identifiable on a map, the space explored by the Italian artist is also a cosa mentale populated by signs that may seem strange to the uninitiated, like sibylline archetypes. One might think of the metaphysical painting of Giorgio De Chirico, and the unsettling sensation of a world of pure autonomy escaping ordinary causality. In these territories of sand and dust, Aliens may land, the spidery picnic tables being reminiscent of a famous episode of Star Wars.
With small touches and shifts of detail, almost imperceptibly, Marco Rigamonti takes us into a fiction where a man bullfights in a van, and where the elements of reality seem to contribute to the construction of a vast trompe-l'oeil. A gigantic bullfighting soul hovers over this unique country, filled with artifacts, as if the slightest act, the slightest scene, was watched by someone who has already been subjected to the ultimate fight, and lost it.
Seeing the great stages of its familiar setting pass by, the beautiful deceased animal takes the time, a luxury for a noble horned beast bred for fighting - but eternity is in no hurry - to go and stroll around Piémanson, its sometimes disemboweled caravans, its pirates, its graceful bathers and its lost tourists. Through the serene stupor of his images, and their gentle irony, the photographer affirms that there is no purity of identity, but a game, certainly serious, intimate, with the codes of belonging, which can only be a source of joy.
Faulkner wrote: "Time does not pass, it has not even passed." Fabien Ribery