Text published in the 2023 Graduates Catalogue of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, by Anne-Laure Peressin
Amid black-and-white images, the artist introduces his work with a few words on light, which is “never where one expects it to be.” This light is what allows his photographs to come into being and be shown to us, to exist and to render themselves present to us. They are cows in a field, a face bathed in sunlight, or the knowing gaze of a friend. Light—the raw material of analogue practice, of transfer, and of the printing of images—induces and generates an existence that is also an experience of being in the world.
Ugo Casubolo Ferro experiences this encounter through his relationship with time. His images reflect a deep attentiveness to the way time takes hold and unfolds. From this search, only a few images emerge: they withstand a kind of selection in order to convey a “full solitude.” This solitude is grasped not through absence but through its embodiment—like the boy who gazes into the void after a long walk, caught in a perpetual oscillation between the shared world and the solitude of experiencing the world.
The experience of time therefore echoes the experience of the image and of matter—something that, for the artist, becomes manifest in the act of creating an image. The photographic stance presupposes the presence of the real object prior to the image: at once artwork and making-present of the object, it is a making-present of the making-present. Moreover, the vocabulary surrounding the “work of light” or the “work of the negative” illuminates a process much slower than the mere capturing of an instant.
In this practice, the artist handles the image as he transposes it into a dialogue with technique through the gesture of printing. It is a fusion with the materiality of the image, whether he lays silver salts onto paper or toner onto concrete. Each gesture brings together again time, light, and matter, doubling the presence of the image—a concept Ugo Casubolo Ferro also explores in classical and contemporary philosophy, through both a writing of light and a writing on paper.
Anne-Laure Peressin, art critic & curator