Artists Newburgh New York 2017-2019

Portraits

“Oppedisano reinvents the nineteenth-century Silhouettes and, with ingenious metamorphosis, translates cinematic editing – a temporal process – into a spatial dimension. He thus renews the genre of portraiture, a genre that, following the path of painting, was at the origin of photography; he does so in three main ways: A) he takes a close-up or extreme close-up of the character and highlights an anatomical detail that is significant to their personality or profession; B) he performs the same operation, breaking down and distorting the close-up; C) he integrates it into their environment, which, for example, could be that of two actors on stage. Anyone who thinks of a technical contrivance as an end in itself, however effective and even spectacular, would be immediately contradicted by the reality of the images: it is difficult to find one portrait similar to another, a repetition. As true artists know, technique (form) serves the subject (content)”.

Morando Morandini

Inner Self

The “Innerself” aim to delve even deeper into the subject; these are portraits that go beyond traditional portraits, emphasizing the dualism of the human soul and capturing its invisibility. The silhouette of the represented subject is like a fingerprint, further characterized by double exposure that reveals within the profile, glimpses, places, and objects that transport us on a poetic journey into the subject’s soul.

“The setting in which Oppedisano puts the person, sometimes anatomized in a close-up shot, sometimes set in his milieu, sometimes even simply metamorphosed by referring to the subject’s profession, is the second frame. In this the photographer inserts one of the four possible portraits of the subject photographed, according to Roland Barthes’ theory: “what the person thinks he is, what the person would like others to think he is, what the photographer thinks the person is, what the photographer exploits to show his art”. It is difficult to say whether Oppedisano, in showing his art, can also reveal his subjects to themselves”. Lanfranco Colombo