Descrizione

Signed and numbered by the artist
Unframed

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This photogravure comes from an original photograph that was part of a series taken with a Plaubel Makina camera on medium format b/w film.
After years spent portraying famous authors and artists especially in his native Italy, Cottinelli has recently committed to photographing the giant oaks that inhabit the old family property in Tuscany’s Maremma.

“I decided to confront myself with the oak in all of its extraordinary beauty, however not with the traditional amateur, tourist, calendar or gift-book toadyism, but rather with the stylistic freedom of the silver-salt photos on black and white medium-format roll-film negative, using old “free roller” cameras. My multiple slipped technique and irregular shooting helped me narrate the oak as if a colossal experiment were taking place: its “invention” in a large outdoor laboratory, where structures, shapes, lights and shadows, branches, leaves and trunks were being developed, agitated and mixed under the pressure of powerful forces and pushed upwards, or inexorably dragged along the horizon in search of an original graphically aesthetic model under the gaze of the sun as it dominates, reveals, hides with shadows – or under the protection of clouds.”

Vincenzo Cottinelli (Brescia, 1938) worked with the Photo Agencies Grazia Neri in Milano and Opale in Paris. His portraits of well known authors and artists and his symbolic pictures are on about 80 book covers in Italy and worldwide. Cottinelli’s prints are in private collections in Brescia, Firenze, Lille, Lugano, Mantova, Milano, Paris, Pitigliano, Prag, Roma, Siena, Tel Aviv, Tokyo, Trieste, Warszawa. In Brescia, his hometown, he founded and manages the no-profit Gallery “La Stanza delle Biciclette” (exhibited authors: Luigi Ghirri, Randa Mirza, Chris Steele-Perkins, Antonella Gandini, Pietro Masturzo, Monika Bulaj, Giorgio Bertelli).

PHOTO-GRAPHICA is a new Pig Prints’ proposal where photography and printmaking are integrated with photogravure.
Photogravure is an old photographic technique that involves the transfer of an image from a film negative onto a copper plate. The plate is then used to print an etching through a printing press.
A more contemporary version of the photogravure uses photopolymer plates rather than copper. This also results in a print that displays beautiful grey tones as well as deep velvety blacks.