The Lost Planet II

… The photographs of the mountains of Valais capture fleeting, short-lived moments, like those of the first flurries of autumn snow. The photographer highlights the ridges and folds of the mountain ranges, inserting small copper, brass and iron nails that both wound and embellish the finished work with discreetly glittering lights. This patient undertaking suggests that today it has become increasingly necessary to go beyond simply observing, towards perceiving by touching — with all the senses — over time.
What she does here is an exercise of proximity, gesture after gesture, nail after nail. These works go beyond the limits of what is visible, penetrating in depth under the surface of the photographic paper, so that they become the result of the integration of the experience of looking with that of the body. As the art historian Rolando Bellini wrote, these ‘imaginal’ works offer us a ‘visual representation that becomes vibrant and, at the same time, motionless, material and immaterial, and real and unreal, and that ends up by congealing in a suspension obtained through the medium of photography.’
Stoppani’s work replaces the objectifying demonstration with metaphor, disorientation and allusion. She asks us to reawaken our clouded fantasies, seeking reciprocity and subtle agreements. Thus other pictures in the Lost Planet II series show the earth from above like a mysterious planisphere, a map to decipher dotted with strange abrasions. Resembling abstract paintings, these disturbing and almost impenetrable works suggest that in order to really see landscape we must imagine it once again. Stoppani’s works show, in other words, that our vision may be enhanced through other senses and that memory, time and imagination help to mould the way we perceive things.