"THE WIND, THE VEIL, THE FACE, KABUL THE PHOTOGRAPH OF PINO SETTANNI

The Galleria Il Diaframma, in 2010, presented in Milan the exhibition of the Apulian photographer Pino Settanni, "The wind, the veil, the face, Kabul 2002-2005" which contained a series of images taken in Afghanistan, the poorest land of the world. At the center of the exhibition is the burqa, the long dress that covers the body and face of women, a “veil of perpetual segregation” (De Seta), a tragic simulacrum of composure and harmony beyond madness. Next to the sumptuous veils of the burqas, fluttering in every place, a population marked by pain: sad or curious faces of adolescents, women caught in the tender embrace of crying babies, men with rough and dignified faces framed by uncultivated and ancient beards, archetypes of a tragic humanity. Settanni, however, goes beyond visual realism: through information technology it replaces the wind, breaking down and reassembling figures, in a chromatic communication of soft and sometimes disturbing lines. Realism thus gives way to an arrhythmic scanning of spaces, to an aesthetic alteration that tends to indistinct genres (painting, photography), to the upheaval of the notion of relationship; a plastic dynamism of great lyrical importance in which perception overcomes the concept of interpretation. An aesthetic distortion created, so that, as the artist himself observes, “the image is looked at with attention”. In this direction, the (formal) "folly of the system", to quote Maurice Nadeau, becomes the folly of the political system. The wind that upsets the veils and faces becomes the metaphor of violence and oppression in which all harmonies become an "immense disorder of all senses".

07.01.2021