THEGregory’s world Crewdson it’s a gigantic set. Each image contains a small story in which immobile characters like statues represent the nuances of moods of desolate lives. It is the fresco of a sorrowful America that draws its suffering from an existential condition so profound as to make us forget the social problems. Crewdson, visual poet, entrusts photography with the task of composing his American pastoral care return a world of lost dreams and dissolved illusions in which the characters, set in the landscape, are small figures in the frame of the great American province, that of Massachusetts in which the author lives and which has long chosen the scenario for his narratives.
A fantastic vision that cannot be more real
Crewdson’s fantastic vision is dark and painful. If it seems to you a work on the landscape, know that he is deceiving you: his landscapes they are beautiful, the warm colours, the blue skies and the wide perspective invite abstraction but it is those small human figures with astonished looks, motionless bodies frozen in the moment and plastic poses, transforming each single work into existential prose.
Meticulous, refined, expert, this American author, born in Brooklyn in 1962, knows his trade: from cinema he learned to invent light, to move the actors, to construct the scenario to shoot. He has entrusted his poetics to photography: what he affirms throughout his journey is his vision, perhaps born from a dream or inspired by a ray of light, it seems like a simple intuition but it is much more, it is the human comedy in the scenario that the artist has imagined, designed and created.
Eveningside: Showcasing the dark side of our world
Gregory Crewdson. From the series An Eclipse of Moths: Starkfield Lane, 2018-2019.
It’s all true, terribly real and yet it’s all invented, terribly constructed. Herein lies the key to the trilogy’s power Gregory Crewdson now on display in Turinat Galleries of Italy until 22 January 2023. “Gregory Crewdson. Eveningside” is entitled, in reality Eveningside is only the third part, commissioned by Intesa Sanpaolo which from now on will enrich the fund of the bank’s collection. Good news in the desert of commissioned photographic production. Finally an institution invests in the visual storytelling of our time.
On display, in addition to the three large bodies of work – Cathedral of the Pines (2012-2014), An Eclipse of Moths (2018-2019), Eveningside (2021-2022) and also Fireflies from 1996: the first truly minimal, poetic and childish work, in which the author, chasing fireflies at night with black and white film, creates small paintings that in sequence accompany us to discover of his world. A little fairy tale that precedes the staging that brought him success.
There is a magic in Crewdson’s gaze that restores a reality that couldn’t be more real, whether it’s the remote forests of Cathedral of the Pines, the landscapes of An Eclipse of Moths or the everyday life of Eveningside. That magic arises from the ability to blend landscape and humanity in a vision, entrusting both with the protagonist role to express feelings, fears, anxieties, colors of an opaque present.
The author invites us to contemplate but what we are called to observe is a scenario that does not respond to the categories of aesthetic judgment of beauty or ugliness: it is human comedy, a portrait of our age and its disillusionments. The American province is a perfect background in which Crewdson makes his actors move on stage, hermits of the third millennium who inhabit post-industrial provinces. They are his family members, his wife, his places because Crewdson handles what he knows with care: what matters to him is what he expresses, witness only to his emotions, creating silent tableau vivant of our time, of this world – the America, the West – and its definitively failed models. In the dark there are no more fireflies but lights that illuminate our contemporary desolate humanity.
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