On Saturday November 12, 2011 in the spaces of the recentley opened gallery Diplomat in Philadelphia will inaugurate the personal art exhibition of Alfonso Chianese, named "To Italy" edited by Chad Muthard.
There will be shown, until Decenber the 7, unpublished photographs selected from two recent projects: "Capraia" and "Park Trotter".
The project "Capraia" shows the area of the former penal colony founded in 1873 and dismissed in 1986 situated in a island of the Tuscan archipelago.
The project "Park Trotter" shows images taken in a school and in a centre of aggregation in Milan in the spaces where once (in the early years of '900) there was a horse race track and later a sanatorium.
These images preserve the memory of a far past, that the artist, starting from the present time, tries to recall through a hard look into the painful traces, of this past unknown to him.
As Chianese says: "For me, working is processing a past not personally lived. The more remote the past is easier it allows on to get lost working on it. With both recently past and present subjects I know too little or too much, and there's no way for me to work on them". Chianese also says: "I'm interested in destruction, the kind that takes place in the moment when I make a successful attempt to exhume a pain lived. In this case, the medium doesn't have to preserve, but to burn what saves us from life".
A pamphlet will be published containing the interwiew to the artist available on line www.diplomatgallery.com
The art gallery Diplomat is situated in the very heart of Parkway Museums District of Philadelphia. It hosts projects of avant-garde photographers.
Alfonso Chianese
To Italy
Diplomat
2016 Green Street
Philadelphia, PA 19130
For information and appointment: 001 610-730-8333
E-mail: cmuthard@gmail.com

Alfonso Chianese was born in Caserta in 1974, lives and works in Milan. He attended a course of Photography at Istituto Europeo di Design in Rome from 1997 to 1999 and a course of Photography and new technologies at CFP "Riccardo Bauer" in Milan where he specialised in photography applied to cultural assets and later in recording and cataloguing photos. The artist has taken part to several art photo exhibitions: collective for "Riccardo Pezza prize" named "The tale of a place"(Triennale di Milano, Milano, 2002); collective "Milan and its territory", documentary exhibition on Milan and its surrundings (Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, Milano,2003); collective exhibition for "Razzano prize" (Rocca dei Rettori, Benevento, 2003); He has held a personal "Der Alte Fuchs" (Galleria Studio legale, Caserta, 2004); Collective exhibition for project "Burn out", a survey on the outskirts of the World (Galleria Umberto di Marino [Ex chiesa delle Concezioniste, Giugliano, Napoli, 2005]); collective exhibition "Prima Visione" (Galleria Belvedere, Milano, 2011). The artist has won in 2010 the third prize at the exhibition "Le cose e il paesaggio" [The things and the landscape], a survey on the relationship between the objects and the landscape, fostered by Distretto culturale della Valcamonica.