The things you see by alessandra baldoni

There is a frame, a bit of cinema that is in the mental archive of the latest generations: the redcoated baby coming out from the grey ( in colors and meanings ) of “ Schindler’s List” a symbol of the stonen childhood.
Symbol, when recognizable, is the icon of absolute values, more than words. When symbol, language and image meet, the tale becomes the best way to tell stories that become universal from personal.
A little girl turning her back on us, with the background of sea,sky and land all together, all these things generate an image that has a deep impact and meanings: Alessandra Baldoni’s shots are magnets that attract and repel in the same time.
Here is Little Red Riding Hood and the wood, here is Alice with her dreams hold in the tea-pot of the Mad-Hatter and SnowWhite with her apple that is love and death together.
Fables heroines or lonely lonely women, these subject are composed by the artist in shuts of stunning beauty.
The actors are conscious characters, no fakes here but composure, balancing from solemn corporeal stillness to sincere emotional vibration.
Their way to be so enigmatic, in a certain way perverse, becomes sweetness of a restless mind, sensible and hidden in those tracks that like pages of a diary, escort the intimate journey of the photographers’ eye.
The sets of this journey are the background paintings of a nature wild and familiar: woods, the sea, the grass, dead leaves in autumn, romantic skies, her stylistic key is the chromatic saturation ( red- green, light- shadow, life- death, reality- dream ).
Subject are so deeply decontextcualized that appear in ther full- alarming realism: looks, when they don’t turn their back attract the attention of the whole frame. The strenght of those eyes, even if not thought as portraits, leads back to the brutal iperrealism of Diane Arbus’ wide- angle lens, that( just like italian neorealism ) caught the plain truth in people’s faces.
But Baldoni has got her feet well planted in her time and you can see it by far looking at her sense of solitude and restlessness which is so “ XXI century ” .
Her “ mise- en- scene ” more than 800’s tableaux vivant looks like fragments of a storyboard where nothing is accidental; and even when the composition is extremely gauged it never comes to be mannerist.
These screen-plays are the static- action of a personal experience that Alessandra Baldoni wants to pass on and explain, to warrant a universality of sense.
We see actors of unfinished screen-plays looking for a place for them, just like pirandellian subjects in a theathre of absurd.

“What really matters it’s not a privileged moment, but to find a reality of his own; after this all the moments are equivalent”

Ugo Mulas

But there is more than this. Here is nature, in strong colors and clear cuts, in which the human shape moves, alone, always pervaded with a sense of unrestlessness and illness.
Still girls vibrate over landscapes of a sublime echo ( but the calm is only apparent ) with menacing and dramatic skies; or look shyless the observer.
Baldoni’s work is the result of a search drove by a deep need to freeze the frame- choosen among millions of others- and to make it last forever.
This is an emergency more than a need for her: photography is, she says : “ the way to immortalize the world, to tell the world, to tell yourself to the world ”.
The tale is the subject of these photos: chinese- boxes which tells and are told,always going to show infinite and different “ point of view “.

Luca Beatrice