Elio Ciol – victory over light fatigue

Italian photographer Elio Ciola’s exhibition, “The Charm of Reality”, held in December 2011-January 2012 at the Gallery of Classical Photography in New York, is one of the extraordinary events in the cultural life of the capital city. From an early age, he studied photography at his father’s studio as a photographer. Chiol picks up a camera at 15 and begins taking photographs. He is primarily interested in new kinds of photography, and in photography he looks for new possibilities. In 1946 he buys a roll of aerial film from American soldiers. It was his first venture into infrared photography, which he immediately exploited for its possibilities and effects. At the age of 20 he won his first prize in a photography contest in Udine where his landscape won third place.

Elio Ciol,

A classic of Italian photography. Born in 1929 in Casarzadella Delizia, Italy, where he lives and works to this day.

From 1955 to 1960 Ciol is actively involved in the life of the Venetian photography club La Gondola and is a member of the Union of Cinematographers in Udine. During the same period, he won several prizes at the New York international amateur photography competition, and his documentaries won a number of prizes at national amateur film contests. Beginning in the 50s, Elio Ciol begins to search for his own language in conveying the beauty of the landscape, and it is during these years that he creates a series of photo albums and exhibition catalogs.

The most important exhibitions in Ciol’s life are those at the Palazzo del Monte Pietà in Padua and at the Church of St. Francisca in Udine.

In 2000, two exhibitions of Elio Ciola took place: in New York and Paris.

Prima Del Temporale, 1963

Before the Storm, 1963

Elio Ciol has had 140 solo and 123 group exhibitions in Italy and abroad. More than 200 books are illustrated with his works.

Italian photographer Elio Ciola’s exhibition, “Enchantment with Reality”, held in December 2011-January 2012 at the Gallery of Classical Photography in New York, is one of the extraordinary events in the cultural life of the capital city.

Elio Ciol, the 83-year old patriarch of classical European photography, is showing more than 150 photographs from the 50s to recent years for the first time in America. Together with the photographer they tell the story of patriarchal Italy, small-town Italy, clerical Italy, Italy of the common people and the “little man. It’s not just Italy, though.

Ever since his youth Elio Chiol was infected with the photomania virus: his father, a professional urban portrait photographer, used to take the child to his studio, where Elio could observe the very process of creating a “light” image “in a room with large windows, where a certain blackout effect could be achieved by adjusting the white curtains.

In his earliest works the photographer depicts portraits of people and landscape environments of his time, inhabitants of small provincial towns and convex Italian skies, genre-breaking urban stories and fragments of landscapes of his native Italy.

Though the exhibition includes the works spanning almost 60 years of the photographer’s career, regardless of the decades the subjects and themes are constantly repeated, creating a super-temporal echo. Urban stories told in the ’50s and ’60s, among them “In Waiting” an elderly lady waiting perhaps for a priest in church “Games in Chioggia” with a magnificent “poplar” development of the space the famous “Via Portica” with a group of monks walking through misty Assisi “Waiting for a Church Procession,” made in Venice, with a precise, careful and incredibly meaningful elaboration of “plans” – rhyming, varying with the later works of the 80s and 90s. What unites them is the author’s ineradicable interest in people and sympathy for them.

The panoramic landscape, shot from a high vantage point, becomes a special “sub-cycle” that runs through his entire oeuvre: whether it is On the Green Market in 1954 or St. Mark’s Square a year later.

Elio Ciola is also interested in the timeless space of the landscape, free from the signs of a particular time, a particular “epoch”. Whether they are lonely houses lost in space or equally deserted fields, their essence is penetrated by light, be it foggy Elio Ciol is very good at fog and his know-how , reflected snow, the atmosphere itself becomes the hero of his landscapes. Magnificent, somewhat detached landscapes, taken again from a high point: “Pinzano under the Snow” 1957 , almost dissolved in the space of white “Snow and Fog in Chimolais” 1958 , – such approach characterizes the author’s work throughout his life. Elio Ciolo needs a certain distance between the eye and reality – it is then that the viewer has the opportunity to “see” and consider the beauty of God’s world. In the 90s this tendency emerges again.

Thus appear geometric fields, alleys and valleys, for example: “Drawings from Vineyards. K”, “Vineyard Drawings. M”, “Vineyard Drawings. V”. According to the author, he equips the works in this series with consecutive letters of the Latin alphabet to set the vector of movement, thereby inviting the viewer to go on a journey with the photographer to once again marvel at the uncreative beauty and thoughtfulness of the world. The mulberry trees, in their very sculptural form, delight the photographer’s eye and force him to create a new artistic reality. This is how the series “Mulberry Trees as Sculptures” emerges. These stumpy trees under the “speaking”, expressive sky another “know-how” of Elio Ciola , the exact geometry of the fields, the weighty volume of white clouds suggest in the artist a sculptor who creates three-dimensional, even four-dimensional “objects” with his magic camera.

A special place in the master’s oeuvre occupies cities. Venice in their “catalog” – in a special place. Since the ’50s the artist has been creating unique black and white “portraits” of the city: “Canal Della Giudeca and the Church of Della Zitelle” 1956 , “Saint George’s Island” 1956 , the expressive “Pigeons in Saint Mark’s Square” 1978 . The last one is an invaluable document of a reality of the Piazza that no longer exists: the pigeons are no longer its symbol because after the law to limit animals in Venice the birds gradually disappeared. And further, already in the 90s, Ciol creates “geometric” sidewalks: “The sidewalk along the Tana River” and “The sidewalk at the Arsenal”.

Another extremely important city for Elio Ciola throughout his career is Assisi, a small town in Umbria, where, according to tradition, St. John the Baptist preached. Francis of Assisi. Fifty years elapse between “Fog in the Olive Grove” in 1958 and “Assisi” in 2009. And, it should be noted, the author’s “iconography” and technique practically does not change. There is a kind of strange constancy in this fidelity to the chosen property of the image, which becomes the author’s credo, from which the words of a contemporary poet come to mind unexpectedly: “for only fidelity will meet us beyond the grave.”.

In the 80’s there is an architectural series: it is a story of “fluid architecture”, the innovative forms of architect Frank Gary, with the organics of its landscape fluid reliefs. It seems that for Elio Ciol this is a continuation of a native and close theme of natural landscapes of the earth. Around these years, the theme of antiquity also appears: photographs of ancient structures in Yemen and Greece.

In the 80’s the artist feels the need to create diptychs and triptychs: united into one plane, the works, according to the artist, “talk” between themselves and with the viewer “Heaven and Earth” . In addition, the graphical quality to which Elio Ciol always gravitated acquires a more “nurtured,” conscious and conceptual character in his diptychs and triptychs. The “Glimpses of Spring” 2001 and the whole series of triptychs from the 90s “Indwelt Trees” from A to F , on display in the Gallery of Classical Photography, force one to think about the almost unlimited communicative resources of photography, which, when handled with sensitivity by the artist, begin to “give back” meanings.

The exhibition at the Gallery also showed landscapes printed with infrared film, which created a very special, magnetic and enigmatic effect of “glow”, of luminescence. Drawing on the infrared film developing technique he learned from his youth American soldiers left large quantities of this material in Italy during the war , “Mr. Infrared” as Elio Ciola was jokingly called by friends and colleagues created an entire gallery of “portraits” of the earth, sky and fields covered in a strange white glow. “Dreams of Dawn 1985 , Haymaking in Dzoppole 1963 – the works at the exhibition represented in this technique seem to concentrate a special power of photographic material in its potential and unfolding possibilities.

Elio Ciola’s black and white works, concentrated, filled with light and as if the very quality of recollection, reproduce the stable and fundamental life and historical realities of what is commonly called time, in its very metaphysical meaning. Deprived of political or acute social imprisonment, of what is usually called relevance, but at the same time bearing certain features of the here and now above all in genre street scenes , they urge the viewer to forget about the “weariness” of time and to immerse themselves in the nature of light, which, according to Elio Ciola, is eternal and knows no weariness.

Says Andrey Martynov,

Elio Ciola, curator and initiator of exhibitions in New York

– Why Elio Ciola exhibition was brought to New York?

– I think Elio Ciola’s photography is good photography, of the highest level. That’s why I brought THIS exhibition to New York. By the way, it’s not the first one in New York. The first was a dialogue between Elio Ciola and photographer Frank Dituri, who have known each other for a long time and who have different approaches to landscape and genre photography. Not surprisingly, DiTuri has developed as an artist from the American school of photography, whereas Elio Ciol is a true Italian photographer. I fell in love with his work at first sight and so when we met face to face, I suggested that he do both his first and second exhibitions.

A third is in preparation: this time a dialogue between the photographer Ciola and the great Giotto. It will be a color photograph. Fortunately, he doesn’t have to be persuaded. It is easy to work with him. And as a curator and organizer of my exhibitions, of course, it’s more interesting to work with the material I like myself.

– What is Elio Ciola’s uniqueness as an artist??

– Ciola’s uniqueness is in his commonness, devotion to tradition, fanatical diligence. Even back in America he climbed onto some military vehicle to take pictures from above a trip in the ’90s , and “snapped” pictures from the windows of the Hermitage, over the objections of the old female guards. I didn’t ask him how many hundreds of meters of film he shot, but judging from his archives, many. The archives, by the way, are kept in immaculate condition. Perhaps this is another secret of Ciola’s success – his pedantry, which his wife, two daughters and son, who is also a photographer, carry on the tradition of his father and grandfather, have to endure. The pedantry of Elio Ciola: for more than 50 years he returned to Assisi and was a veritable chronicler of this medieval city, celebrating its imperishable beauty for many years.

– How his life is arranged?

– Simple everyday life. With a well-established rule: the first attention in the house, at the table, is given to the guest, then to the patriarch and then to everyone else. This simple scheme works, and no one has any desire to change it. The Cioli live a modest, clean and tidy life. The small house is surrounded by a small garden with several trees, which for some reason evoke associations with Japan. A house filled with the kindness of Elio Ciola himself and his entire family. Kindness radiates from his photographs.

– His books?

– He published many books and photo albums. I haven’t seen all of them, but many of them have won high awards at book fairs. A book dedicated to the neo-realist period of Ciola’s work sold out in a flash and is now a bibliographic rarity.

Via Portica-Assisi, 1958

Via Portica, Assisi, 1958

La Nonna Miuta, Casarsa 1954

Grandma Miuta, Casarsa 1954

In San Pietro-Roma 1955

In St. Peter’s Cathedral, Rome 1955

Mezzogiorno a Chioggia-Chioggia 1959

Noon in Chioggia, Chioggia, 1959

Ragazzi a Cimolais, 1958

Boys in Cimola, 1958

Paesaggio Evanescente, Assisi, 2009

Vanishing Landscape, Assisi, 2009

Prima Del Temporale, 1963

Before the Storm, 1963

In Attesa Della Processione, Venezia 1955

Waiting for the Procession, Venice, 1955

Laguna di Grado 1970

Laguna Grado, 1970

Eur-Roma 1955

Rome, Italy 1955

Giovani a S Daniele-S Daniele del Friuli, 1957.

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