PIETRO DE FILIPPI

ABOUT THE ARTIST

WORKS

ABOUT THE ARTIST

INTRODUCTION

In Karl Blossfeldt’s work Origins of Art, published in 1928 and perhaps the most well-known book about art and photography, the following remark can be read in the foreword: "As polymorphic the realm of growing and decaying, crystallized, animal, and vegetative forms may be, they were determined by an otherworldly, fixed law that called them into being. All forms of nature are the perpetual repetition of the same processes over thousands of years and only climatic change or shifting properties of terrain effect change, which does not shake the foundations of their basic forms. Ferns and horsetails have had their present form for an inconceivable period of time." Actually, as explained by the Italian photographer, this series of black and white photos began as a sort of stylistic exercise. De Filippi wanted to photograph the same plant every morning. It was not so much a naturalistic interest that moved the photographer to take the pictures, but rather the search for an existing, subconscious dimension that moved more and more towards the foreground of the work with every progressive step. Thereby De Filippi places himself in the grand tradition of artistic nature photography, where the “raw material” – the plant world and its essential properties – is only a pretext to the advance of artistic creation to the symbolic level. The result however (when so clearly and magically achieved as in these pictures) is that for us observers it is suddenly clear what treasures of form and structure lie directly at our feet, if only we had the eyes to see them... Pietro De Filippi studied photography in Rome, worked at first as a press and then fashion photographer for Italian Vogue among other clients. His work has been exhibited throughout Italy. Today he works as a commercial photographer in Rome, but dedicates his free time more and more passionately to free experimentation and the search for his own individual images, like this series that was developed in 2006. In Blossfeldt’s book referred to at the opening of this text, the following sentence, particularly relevant today, is written: "We experience that today’s youth, in renunciation of relentless materialization and intellectualization, is turning again toward the elementary force of nature." So now let us be silent before these striking, poetic images "based on nature".