If we accept the idea that the purpose of photography is to return a coherent and understandable image of reality and we do not consider the fact that reality itself is not entirely objective, we cannot understand that the perception of everything that surrounds us it is nothing more than the fruit of our mental process that processes visual information. Therefore what we call reality is only a set of individual, changing and unstable perceptions. It is in this area that my research on informal photography moves, where the realism of the mechanical medium is replaced by the perception of shape and colours, sometimes unique and unrepeatable as in the encounter between fluids of different colors and densities, other times with the de-contextualization of an ordinary object, or part of it, to the point of dissolving any reference to consolidated reality and regenerating it in a new expressive solution. In any case, the "real" data is replaced by the "possible" one and in this way reality is perceived through the senses, where it is the mind of the observer that attributes meaning to what he sees.

According to Aristotle, matter is the substrate of every change and every movement of form, and it is also the principle of things, constitutive of corporeality itself. Conceived in this way, matter is pure indeterminacy, knowable only indirectly, which argues its existence as necessary for the composition of reality. In this way, matter is understood as power, pure capacity, which is nothing, but which can become something.

In the series Materia, I continue my research on the concept of abstraction in photography, where matter is used in its different states to explore the expressive possibilities of forms. In particular, the fluid states of matter give rise to extremely fleeting forms, creating compositions that have the ability to exist only for an instant, before disappearing and merging back into matter itself.

Reality is a conspiracy created by the illusion of the senses

The images of the Fragments Series are a tribute to Fragmentism or to the Poetics of the fragment, a literary trend developed in Italy in the early 1900s where the construction of the literary work does not take place through an organized set of events and situations, but through a mosaic of fragments of images and episodes unrelated to each other and which, in some ways, unite this poetics with the expressionism.

In the images of this series the formal element is reduced to a fragment, dissolving any reference to visible reality to transform itself, to paraphrase Anne Janowitz, into “a partial whole either a remnant of something once complete and now broken or decayed, or the beginning of something that remains unaccomplished.”. In all of this, the image is transformed into a radiant moment, out of time, which can never be completed because it aspires to infinity.

Io sono come te freddo e nudo,
fratello. Sono solo e infecondo.

                              Scipio Slataper

The Ekpýrosis, is a research on the concept of abstraction that originates from the de-contextualization of an ordinary object, or part of it, to the point of dissolving any reference to visible reality. It is in this way that the formal element, reduced to fragments, is regenerated towards a new expressive solutions.
 
The Ekpýrosis, in Greek philosophy, is the universal conflagration, also called "great fire", which periodically determines the end of everything in a cosmic fire, from which everything is reborn in a palingenesis. Each period of time is born out of fire and culminates in destruction through fire; in many philosophies of antiquity we find the idea that the universe is born and ends in fire, or is destroyed to be reborn from its own ruins.

                           
Nor shall this peace sleep with her; but as when the bird of wonder dies, the maiden phoenix, her ashes new create another heir as great in admiration as herself.

W. Shakespeare - Henry VIII

Marcus Vitruvius Pollonius in the first book of “De architectura” expresses a key concept from which, in his opinion, the three components of architecture can be extrapolated: Utilitas, Firmitas and Venustas.  The latter, Venustas i.e., beauty, can in some respects be regarded as Eve's apple: something one is almost afraid of, but for which one feels an irrational attraction. 

The U.S. historian Philip Johnson, often emphasized during his lectures at Yale University, the mystery of beauty. Why do we choose the beautiful over the comfortable? We do not know, but nevertheless the quest for beauty always keeps coming up. If we place this discourse in a historicist view indeed it is true. The “beautiful” inextricably continues to be a feature, voluntarily or not, sought after in architecture. Whether through new forms or the rehashing of more archaic ones. And what is most destabilizing is the fact that Venustas alone influences Utilitas and Firmitas more than these two together do on Venustas itself. It is therefore Venustas that is in charge ... always!

                         
My work is not about "form follows function"
but "form follows beauty" or, even better,
"form follows feminine."
                                                 Oscar Niemeyer

Although the seed had already been sown since the seventeenth century, it was in the twentieth century that the revolt of artists against the concept of "beauty", or at least the denial of the aesthetics of beauty, exploded in all its virulence, inside the historic avant-gardes, especially Cubism, Dadaism and Expressionism. This last movement, in particular, exalting the emotional value of art, seeks the subjective vision of reality and tries to represent the anxieties of modernism and the ugliness masked by bourgeois hypocrisy. In representing this, expressionism does not hesitate to use unpleasant images, indeed, never as with expressionism does 'ugly' become art!

Flowers have always fascinated me for their strong symbolic charge linked to the cycle of life and death and for their representation of the ephemeral concept of beauty. In the same way, I found in them the perfect dichotomy between the concept of beauty and ugliness that fulfilled in the short passage of their existence, from sprout to death. The formal beauty of the anthesis is followed by its metamorphosis towards decadence... and even this decadence can become a beauty expression.

                            
Man screams from the depths of his soul; the whole era becomes a single, piercing shriek.
Art also screams, into the deep darkness, screams for help, screams for the spirit.
This is Expressionism.
                                                              Hermann Bahr

They say about Me:

Born in Nuoro, Italy in 1961, he has been passionate about photography since he was a boy and completed his studies in Milan at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, where he graduated with honors in 1986 with a thesis on the evolution of photographic portraiture from the early twentieth century to the 1980s. During the last year of the course of study he began to work as a photographer in the field of fashion and produced editorial services for “Beauty” magazines, small advertising campaigns of then emerging fashion designers and the photographic portraits of contemporary Milanese artists; following his graduation he decided to move to Paris where, however, the contrast between the too many compromises of the fashion world and his own extraneous nature led him to abandon this world. Later, after devoting himself for many years to journalism and outdoors photography, at the dawn of the new millennium he began to devote himself to fine art photography, which he himself defined as “the possibility of working apart from the concept of commission.” With the photographic series Flowers in the early 10s of this century, shot in studio and in large analog format, he gained international recognition from several art magazines and a number of collectors of photographic works printed with the platinum-palladium technique. Later, after a series on the urban landscape, he devoted himself totally to the search for informal aesthetics; thus the series Fragments, Ekpýrosis and Phaos were born, characterized by the search for the abstraction of the everyday object, with its de-contextualization and destruction until its rebirth in a new image. But it is with the series Materia that the research on the concept of informal perception in photography finds the ideal synthesis of the union between the expressive possibilities of form and the mechanical medium of shooting, where the clash between fluids of different density and color creates extremely fleeting forms that give rise to compositions that last only for an instant, only to disappear into the matter itself.     

Ronald Loughty - ArtVille Magazine