PIKTURA: RUINS WITHIN RUINS

Ruines de Palais en peintures - Villa Italie

"All men have a secret attraction to ruins. This feeling stems from the fragility of our nature, from a secret conformity between these destroyed monuments and the rapidity of our existence."

This 19th-century quote from FR Chateaubriand testifies to man's attachment to and fascination with ruins. Whatever the parallel with the hazards, fragility, and unknowns of human life, ruins remain a totem of civilization, like a testimony, a story. However inert they may be, they have never spoken, recounted, explained, and, above all, inspired so much...

Indeed, since the 17th century, several renowned painters have immortalized ruins in their paintings, giving them both a historical and artistic meaning. DESIDERIO, PANINI, PIRANESE, PATEL and HUBERT ROBERT honor the ruin in their compositions, referring to a form of nostalgia and the magnificence of these deconstructed architectures... Subject of paintings, the ruin and their representations thus embody a function in the collective memory. Becoming an artistic object, we move from the ruin of the field to the ruin of the studio or the painting becomes fanciful, imagining grandiloquent abandoned architectures, especially after the 17th century. Paintings of ruins will end up testifying to the vanity of civilizations, their grandeur and their knowledge beyond the fact that the places themselves were not lucky enough to remain in their original splendor.

Whenever I discover paintings in an abandoned villa or palace, I look for the detail of ruins, and often they appear, until they are often the main subject. Discovering paintings of ruins in ruins gives an incredible feeling of repetition between several centuries or I myself become the witness of this evolution, as I have already written " Decline of beauty and beauty of decline" go hand in hand in this almost fractal theme. The most astonishing thing about painting ruins is to see that in the history of art this has a major place and its own aesthetic such as I seek to reproduce it in photography, which reinforces the role of photography on the artistic testimony of architectures.

"Ruin painting is seemingly an artistic contradiction, since it highlights the ephemeral nature of human work and the final triumph of nature over artists' claims to aestheticize the world. However, the depiction of ruins has indeed become, mainly in the 18th century , a pictorial genre in itself, of which we can discover some representatives, echoing the exhibition."

Josef Koudelka, Ruins .

As Koudelka points out, ruin painting has made its place in the art world, rediscovering it in places that are themselves in ruins has a very special flavor that I love to contemplate in certain discoveries mainly made in Italy. From there I wanted to make a specific series that you can find on my site and I call it PIKTURA

PIKTURA ON THE SITE