Cinematography. Doubt. Folly. Rationality and irrationality merging across the background of the New York metropolitan area.
Cinematography of Urban Madness is a project of artistic contamination and synthesis between cinematographic and photographic narrative. Focusing his attention on the image seen as a film still, Italian artist Pietro Reviglio recreates fragments of an imaginary screenplay revolving around the figure of an artist and his studio, a New York interior in which alienation intertwines with folly and tension gives way to violence.
The project combines elements of photography, video and writing, to unveil the dark side of the artistic practice, its places, subjects and objects, mixing cinematographic fiction with autobiographical material. Through contrasting narrative and image, and eliminating all cause and effect relations, Reviglio recreates the scrambled structure of distorted thought, investigating the very process of visual narrative and challenging its canons.
Reviglio’s book, Cinematography of Urban Madness, is available for viewing and purchase (this is the53rd title of the disegnodiverso series curated by noted art editor Paola Gribaudo).
“A riveting new book, Pietro Reviglio’s Cinematography of Urban Madness questions the nature of real and imagined cinematic narratives in a visually stunning manner. The harsh lighting of an artist studio sets the tone for this short enigmatic work wherein autobiography meets fiction with violent overtones.” Jason Stupa, NY Arts, Fall 2010
Born in Turin, Italy in 1976, Pietro Reviglio has exhibited in the United States, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom. He studied at the Art Students League and received his PhD in Astrophysics at Columbia University. Applying a scientific approach to the analysis of visual elements and using physics as a pictorial medium, his work experiments with the physical process of image formation and perception, visual narrative and the kinematics of images, exploring the borderline between the rational and the irrational, the conceptual and the physical, and the mathematically predictable and the stochastic.