Mustafa Sabbagh presents a series of works – 16 photographs and two installations – born out of an encounter with the pictorial work of Giovanni Boldini, the famous portrait painter of the Belle Époque, and in close dialogue with the spaces of Palazzo Massari that house his monographic museum. Displaced along the rooms, the shots of the Italian-Jordanian photographer confront the works but also the environments that house them, their atmospheres charged with memory, and the signs of time and history imprinted on them.
From the reflection on spaces come the two installations. The first is a large photograph depicting a corner of Boldini’s full-length portrait room, printed on glass and subsequently torn to pieces. The work proposes a discontinuity of vision, a rupture and, with them, the possibility of a different look at the universe referred to by the work and the artist’s house-museum, to which to approach not only as nostalgic vestiges of a distant world.
The second installation consists of two large-format backlit prints that replicate views of the garden overlooked by the windows of one of the rooms. It investigates the relationship between indoor-outdoor space and the projection of these into the fictional dimension of the artwork.
The selection of photographs, presented along the museum’s itinerary, depict models concealed behind fetish masks composed of disparate objects, such as forks, wigs, blinkers, helmets, veils, and stuffed birds, created by Simone Valsecchi, a dress designer who has collaborated with artists such as Luca Ronconi and Peter Greenaway. Single, or paired in darkly beautiful diptychs, in which figures are juxtaposed against nocturnal landscapes, these images are composed with extreme refinement and obsessive attention to technical and compositional detail and allude to an imagery of constraint and torture.

With skillful technique, Sabbagh captures the subject, silhouettes him against anthracite and cobalt backdrops, locking him in hieratic poses, frontally or in profile, as if engraved on ancient medals. In the pretense of disguise, the gaze, the medium of life, is shielded by the mask, an expression of simulation, but at the same time a vehicle for the revelation of the self and one’s drives. Twenty-first-century matrons and knights, highly elegant dandies in leather jackets, sickly Venuses constrained in uncomfortable girdles and rigid corsets, remain frozen in the very instant of their ephemeral appearance, offering themselves to the gaze as modern vanitas, indifferent to time vanishing like the smoke from their cigarettes.
In these icons, whose icy appearance is enhanced by the precision and extreme realism of the photographic medium, Sabbagh restores his vision of an age thirsty for protagonism, in which appearance is central to self-assertion. It is no coincidence that the Italian-Jordanian has an important career in fashion photography behind him, an experience from which he moves to investigate what lies behind the search for the mannered and artifactual image and within the obsession with the immutable perfection of one’s appearance. Irreverent and melancholic, his effigies desecrate an idea of violent as much as banal sensuality that is offered to the gaze of the observer today. It is in this aspect that Sabbagh’s models converse with Boldini’s portraits, resonating with the work of the painter who in Paris, with unparalleled virtuosity, more than a century ago, depicted the extreme elegance, sometimes pushed to the limits of paroxysm, of princesses and demi-mondaines of a complex and controversial era, the fin de siècle, coming to impose a true model of fashion and costume.
A close relative of that era, our time is interpreted by Sabbagh’s modern portraiture in one of its most pervasive and striking manifestations. By its very nature, the portrait is a celebration, but also a testimony to the social and existential patterns of an era. It is a creative act that arises from the interaction between the personality of the artist and that of the effigy, a product of the eye that observes and chooses how to portray and, at the same time, the fruit of the model’s desire, and it is, finally, the artistic expression by which the traces of our existence have always been delivered to posterity.

Edited by.

Maria Luisa Pacelli and Barbara Guidi

Organizers

Modern and Contemporary Art Galleries