LONDON.- Large Glass is presenting People I Care About, Italian artist Mario Cresci's second solo exhibition at the gallery.

The exhibition focuses on a series of images made in Tricarico, a town and comune in the province of Matera, Italy, between 1966 and 1967. At the time sociologists and intellectuals were drawn to this Southern Italian region, inspired by the writings of Carlo Levi and the anthropological research of Ernesto De Martino. These portraits are part of a significant body of work that documents this area and its people and Cresci's own relationships to them.

Antonella Pelizzari writes in her accompanying text:

"Like the traces left by a contemporary migrant, the works in this exhibition are signs of a human encounter with multiple geographies and media. The camera for Mario Cresci is equivalent to a brush, a felt pen, and a charcoal, in its continuous writing and rewriting of an experience, in the reframing of an action, the recuperation of an absence, and the imaginative games with memory,"

In 1967, Cresci traveled from the North to the South of Italy with a multidisciplinary group of urban planners, architects, and sociologists from Venice, where Cresci had shaped his vision according to a multidisciplinary school of industrial design. The group, Il Politecnico, settled in the town of Tricarico, in Basilicata, to develop its first masterplan. The culture of this project transcended earlier perceptions of the Southern territory as primitive and marginal, and instead, implicated the local farmers to speak their minds. No longer the passive victims of numerous documentary photographs taken in the Italian South in the postwar years, the local inhabitants contributed to a pragmatic method that supported their work and interaction with the land.





Cresci was behind the camera to provide the visual records for the publication and graphic design of this plan. He also listened and observed the gestures and expressions across the numerous community meetings, letting time unfold. A selection of the photographs taken at the monthly assemblies with this community results in blurred figurations where the faces, arms, and hands of these farmers are suspended in a duration that looks like a continuous flow.

Cresci described the work with this community as a slow and incremental process of human connection and reciprocal storytelling, explaining how the experience demanded that one left one’s own coordinates, certainties and beliefs, and entered other existential spaces.

As Cresci stated, “you get nowhere on your own; that is why I cherish the memory of the people I have worked with—those who contributed to the dialogue and development of my projects and, ultimately, to my own professional growth.” The encounter with Tricarico brought Cresci to discover a new region and within that experience, the multiform ways to record and reframe his perception of the physical world.

Running alongside Cresci’s London exhibition, 'People I Care About', Matèria gallery in Rome will present 'I luoghi del possibile’ from 3 October to 5 December.

Mario Cresci was born in Chiavari, Italy in 1942 and now lives and works in Bergamo. He attended the School of Industrial Design in Venice and currently teaches at the ISIA University in Urbino.

Cresci’s work has been exhibited at major museums and institutions, including MAXXI (Museo Nazionale delle Arti del XXI Secolo) in Rome, GAM (Galleria d'Arte Moderna) and CAMERA (Centro Italiano per la Fotografia) in Turin, and GAMeC (Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea) in Bergamo. His work was included in the recent REVERSING THE EYE: Arte Povera and Beyond 1960–75 Photography, Film, Video exhibition at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

Major publications include Matera: Images and Documents (1975), Measurements. Photography and Territory (1979), and Segni Migranti. Storia di grafica e fotografia (2019), which won the Prix du Livre Historique at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2020.

Antonella Pelizzari is a professor of the history of photography at Hunter College, City University of New York (CUNY). A specialist in Italian visual culture, she has written extensively on art and photography. Her latest anthology is titled Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, 1910–1970.