Robert Polidori
Between 2017 and 2018, Robert Polidori spent long periods of time in Naples photographing the city’s abandoned churches to explore the gradual decline of religious fervour, a reoccurring characteristic of modernity throughout the entire Western world and a cultural transformation which entails many psychological effects.
Without ever altering the scenes before his eyes, Polidori manages to capture the emotional aspects of these sites in his shots while leaving their memory intact. Through his lens, the deterioration is sublimated and becomes a metaphor of a state of being. His large-scale pictorial, colour photographs lead the viewer into a suspended dimension where stories overlap one another and are revealed through layers of material displaying the design of time’s slow passage which give life to “spontaneous paintings” that artist manages to capture in an eternal moment.
For Polidori, abandoned churches are “places of being”, as are the ruins of Oplontis, Pompeii and the Phlegraean Fields for they allow visitors to perceive the existence of a time, which is not the historical, measurable period that restoration works attempt to resuscitate. Rather this is a lost time, far from our world, the traces of which each of us carry deep within ourselves.