Piero Gemelli

In the decade which started out amidst abundance and then lapsed into uncertainty, the years of fast-paced trends, of vulgarity and grace, of luxury and lightheartedness, [...] Piero Gemelli worked in the flash lights and the glossy paper, amidst the splendor of high fashion, that unreal beauty of the runway models, alongside the gurus of the lenses, maintaining a certain distance, observing with intrigued participation the magnificence of that world, the sweet euphoria which today is fading away amidst the troubles afflicting Italy and the world at large.
[...] What was beauty for Piero Gemelli in the years in which feminity reigned supreme, a static, imposing, almost overdone embodiment? For him beauty is an object which is transformed as if it had a life of its own, and the body is revealed in movement and gesture. If he was asked to photograph a lipstick, he transformed it, had it attacked by a golden scarab, changed it into a mysterious, potentially dangerous flower. If he was asked to promote a perfume, he would display the broken bottle, shattered, becoming a faraway iceberg.
[...] A bit of wire, a sort of photographic obsession, was bent, moved, wound, drawing a face around an eyelash curler, becoming the writing of a cartridge pen, becoming wind and movement capturing the tiny statue of a running athlete. [...] As gemelli has said, "I don't seize the moment; I don't photograph what actually happens but what I would want to happen. My works are fantasies and I am lucky enough to make them become reality."
For this reason more than other fashion and beauty photographs in the major magazines, Gemelli's images recall a certain strain of film from that decade, approaching the no man's land of today: the film of the imagination, at times poetic and at times threatening, wherein special effects are transformed into actual objects, leading us into a sort of virtual reality.

Natalia Aspesi, Milano 1994

Piero Gemelli works since a long time on space and volumes. He is one of the few experts of rarefied and ultra-sharp cosmetic still-lifes.
His assignments led him in a territory where objects float in vacuum-like atmospheres, enlightened by diffused light-rays, sharpened and devoid of casual reflections. Very spatial, very modern images.
But he also manages to combine these spatial atmospheres with his loved neo-classic style, reaching a sort of metaphysical image that reminds, in some way, the works of De Chirico or Morandi.
He is an architect so he looks at things with a sort of all-encompassing attitude that enables him to detach the object from reality moving it to a higher plane, visualizing it in a different dimension.
And when he moved on to the human figure he mantained the same detached attitude he used with objects. So the subjects are often unrelated to the photographer, they seem alone or displaced, their attitude is unusual and conveys various spatial concepts: perspective, speed, movement.
Moreover sometimes he plays at intersecting the two planes, photographing bodies as if they where volumes or space: we have an example in the three images of nude which are unexpectedly blurred and spatial.

For LateAndModern Gemelli has selected some of his "Objects d'affection", images of gypsum sculptures hanging in space, still lifes, nudes and a selection of displaced subjects.