Pasquale Proia - photography - Omaggio a Umberto Mastroianni

Professor Vincenzo Bianchi, who previously curated my exhibition "Il mio viaggio nel colore sulla strada della fotografia", proposed the idea of creating an exhibition in tribute to the sculptor Umberto Mastroianni. For this project, we selected twelve photographs that align with his themes and dynamic forms.According to Professor Bianchi, certain aspects of my photographic research, influenced by Spatialist painting and laser experimentation, succeed in capturing the essence of movement and the vital energy of the subjects, transforming them into abstract visions that evoke the expressive power of Mastroianni’s works.

With the project Homage to Umberto Mastroianni – Forms, Colour, Poetry, I propose a photographic journey born from a heartfelt dialogue with the work and vision of one of the most significant Italian sculptors of the twentieth century.
Through the use of light, abstraction, and matter, I have sought to craft a visual narrative in which photography becomes a plastic gesture, rhythm, and vibration, much like the forms of Umberto Mastroianni that have profoundly shaped my sensibility.

We are both children of Fontana Liri, a land that Mastroianni evoked as a place “where myrtle and hawthorn intoxicate the liquid air of every corner.”
Yet it was also the same land where, during a bombardment, he spoke of seeing “rivulets of light coursing through the cracks of the village.”
These images have always stayed with me: beauty and wound, light piercing through shattered space, and the gaze that transforms fracture into form.

My photography springs from this tension. The images in this project do not document: they reinterpret, transform, and listen to the matter.
Far from a didactic reproduction, this work unfolds as a poetic and visual interpretation of an artistic legacy, turning the photographic surface into an energetic field, a dynamic act, an expressive cosmos.

Exhibition catalogue

For the enduring friendship and esteem, for the sincerity of his art and poetics, I embrace and thank the Artist and friend Prof. Vincenzo Bianchi for encouraging me to create this tribute to the poetics of the Master and our fellow citizen Umberto Mastroianni. Thank you, Vincenzo, for your closeness, which fills me with joy and spurs me to continue my creative journey.

Pasquale Proia

Umberto Mastroianni (Fontana Liri 1910 - Marino 1998 ) was one of the leading Italian sculptors of the twentieth century, a Master distinguished by a continuous experimental and innovative quest. One of the most dynamic and internationally recognised contemporary artists of the last century, Mastroianni was the first Italian abstract sculptor to create dynamic geometric forms using the most diverse materials. His research, rooted in figurative traditions and inspired by the speed and vitality of Futurist, Cubist, and Surrealist avant-gardes, explored the rendering of dynamic values in structures conceived as a coagulation of lines of force, a generative nucleus of an explosion of gestures trapped in matter.

Pasquale Proia’s photographs, born from laser experimentation, align with spatialist painting. They are drawings of light, sometimes created without a camera. His is an avant-garde poetic research, characterised by harmonious lines and forms with colours and tonal variations that endow the digitally transformed initial subject with a powerful lyrical abstraction. Pasquale extracts the archetype of the subject and, as Umberto Mastroianni once did, transforms its representation—not faithfully reproducing a moment, but capturing its essence, the materialisation of the dynamism of things, their energy, and their structure, engaging the spatial dimension. Pasquale’s are suspended worlds, provocations to the imagination, within an unusual parenthesis that invites us to pause, observe, and listen to the relationship between all that is outside and all that is within us.