Claudio Abate

During Florens 2010, international week (13 – 20 november) for Cultural and Environmental Heritage, presented in the Close up cycle, staged at Galleria Il Ponte for some years now, are the Rediscovered Shots by Claudio Abate for Gino De Dominicis. In 2009 we had already devoted a wide-ranging retrospective to Claudio Abate, but in this Close up we present some images which, through his gaze, reveal the personality, creative flair, subjectivity and artwork of Gino De Domincis. The display comprises many unprecedented testimonies to remember and pay homage to the man, artist and friend De Dominicis, who – at a certain point in his life – wanted to destroy all the photographs portraying him and his works: a way to impress his poetics by placing the unique and irreproducible work of art at the centre of a sort of artistic ‘carpe diem’.
These ‘rediscovered shots’ look to us like archaeological remains, extraordinarily rare traces of works of art that often lasted a few days, or even just a few hours. This is the case of the Lo Zodiaco (1970) or the geometrical shapes drawn on the floor of Galleria L’Attico in Rome. They are such unique images that they have taken on a parallel value to the work that they document, to become works of art in themselves. Now Abate has built a journey in the expressive notions of De Dominicis, dissenter and iconoclast, criticised and adored; thus we can reread many lost works without forgetting the environment in which he lived and worked.