The exhibition Above presents for the first time, an ongoing series by Italian visual-conceptual artist Paolo Nicola Rossini. This visual diary approaches the world around us from above – playing with scale and perspective to capture the familiar through an unfamiliar lens.

This new sky series is a visual diary through the eye and imagination of the artist. Documenting the sky of the day to create daily, weekly and monthly compositions, these composite works make us take a closer look at our environment and what we see in our daily landscape. As with Rossini’s earlier series, the passage of time is a concept which plays a part together with taking the unnoticed, or mundane of the day to day that is almost an invisible detail and making it the focus.

Rossini’s evolution toward artistic photography started in 2007. Since the beginning, his work has been inspired by a truly personal way of representing reality and the evolution of his photography has always been directed by an intimate interpretation of his subjects.

From his first series which focused on mostly ignored objects, followed by collages of sequential images that attempted to catch the movement and change of scenery and our perception of it, his attention then evolved toward a deeper conceptual approach and concentrated on landscapes (in the loosest sense of the word), nature and a personal interpretation of “still life”; in these works the subjects appear as suspended in time and space, almost indefinite.

Rossini developed a process of mixing video and photography, that enabled him to catch subjects’ movements and at the same time melt different images into a single one. The process created a sense of suspension between past and present, creating a transition of time, spaces, and subjects – a theme consistent and central to his artistic trajectory. In the “Black Series” is a purely photographic work but still based on a very intimate vision of reality. It represents a world where all is darkness and the light comes from inside the subject itself. The black permeates all the surrounding space and it is the most striking feature of this series and the various subjects represented – airplanes, buildings, trees, landscapes and almost imaginary aerial visions – all emerge as sources of light themselves – another important element of the artist’s style.

In both cases, photography is not the final goal but a means of representation and it is used in a more unconventional way; the works look like a painting of a reality seen from the mind more than the eyes and the camera lens.

Rossini has experimented with different approaches to portraying his intimate representation of reality. This experimentation has led to the emergence of this new body which has both a  technical and conceptual approach. It is a permanent ongoing project to shoot and compose the skies over a determined period of time; a sort of research that follows the theme over a very long period and very different locations to picture the passing of time and how the same subject can appear so different very single day and how the light plays magically among the clouds and other earthly elements, and how different the world seems inversing the view from down upwards; it is like a diary work through photography with a documental spirit of time and place.