Raffaele Montepaone

“Montepaone’s works describe Calabria through the faces and hands of its centenarian women. [...] Stories of people with their features furrowed by strain and time, where the image of the body is not an objective data, not a fact, but a legacy that is essentially the result of the influence of the environment and the personal history of the subject in question”. This is Simona Gavioli’s gaze over the path of an artist who is first and foremost a person in search of something, a photographer who freezes a moment in time: “I don’t know whether Calabria is a dream or reality for me, whether it is disenchantment or hope, surrender or struggle. One thing is certain, and that is it remains a geography (an unexplored one) of the soul, nearly always suffocated by negative stereotypes it has burdened itself with (or has it been burdened with?) over the course of time. I am searching. Still and always. I observe. I scrutinize. I try to go beyond”.

Catanzaro, MARCA, October - December 2017