Milan – A few months after the closure of the great exhibition at the Mudec in Milan, David La Chapelle returns as a protagonist to the Deodato Gallery with his new exhibition “Poems and Febvers”, curated by Gianni Mercurio, until 17 December.
The photographer has reached an artistic maturity that places him among the best visual creators of our time. As always, La Chapelle stages a cocktail of pop sacredness, a blend of classic taste with Fellini-esque nuances.
His works tell of a new Renaissance, starting from Andy Warhol’s Pop Art and Michelangelo’s mannerisms.
Many of the artist’s most important photographs are present in the gallery. The works of the first period deal with ecological and consumerist themes. Here La Chapelle uses many stylistic features typical of fashion and advertising, makes a wise use of irony, using subjects from the Star System. The change of direction takes place in 2006 when two important events occur in his artistic life, a visit to the Sistine Chapel and his transfer to an organic farm in the Hawaiian Islands, which will take him away from the world of advertising to devote himself completely to art.
Hawaii is a new Eden for La Chapelle, an earthly paradise full of promise. In the latest works, an inexhaustible search for the sacred is perceived, through very long waits and very deep silences. La Chapelle creates a new world, a Genesis that is both modern and very ancient, in constant conversation with the Bible and in antithesis with the decadence and emptiness of contemporary society.
Since the beginning of his career, the photographer has felt the unease of the society in which he lives, as if New York were a new Babylon on the brink of the abyss, a city that destroys the soul of the human being and mortally wounds everything that tap. An idea of spirituality begins to mature in him which over the years will become the opening towards a new world, both coveted and difficult to reach.
La Chapelle says – “I met my first boyfriend in New York City. I was 19 and he was 21. We lived together for three years, and in the spring of 1984 he died of a mysterious illness. Within a very short time many of my friends in town were dying of it. I remember asking God, “Why is this happening?” I felt death all around me and was convinced that I myself would not live beyond the age of 24. From this chaos was born the urgency to create and to answer the question: “Where does the soul go?” With this idea in mind I worked in the darkroom, hand painted negatives of figurative images I staged, using friends, lovers, dancers and those close to me to depict angels, saints, martyrs and miracle workers in a new world. I felt I was being guided by something beyond myself, and I became convinced that faith was absolutely necessary to continue my life and work.”
In his artistic journey the seeds of a new Genesis emerge, they become tableaux around the figure of the Virgin Mary, on a journey towards light and paradise. The human being seeks purification, longs for an essential life in balance with nature.
Significant is the photograph “Revelations”, an elderly couple kissing in an abandoned street, trying to resist the collapse of the world. The image is part of a large photographic and film project commissioned by the artist Daphne Guinness, and is inspired by a biblical prophecy about the end of the sick world.
To react to this desolation, La Chapelle develops the idea of a world, where the living beings represented inhabit a distant planet where life is different.
As in the movie “2001 A Space Odyssey,” we perceive a force that fundamentally changes human perspective. We are witnessing a new birth, a miracle that could save the world.
Blue-skinned men, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, androgynous women with a halo and perturbing sensuality. A new world has been born, intriguing, seductive, which links Christian iconography to the exaltation of a sinless nature. Nudity becomes a mystical image that annihilates perversion and reaches the mystery of life.
La Chapelle believes in miracles, believes in life and believes in art and, thanks to him, we do too.
Marzia Rizzo and Andrea Corbella
The photographer La Chapelle is back in Milan – ArteVarese.com