Alessandro Durini di Monza was twelve years old when he took his first photograph, a polaroid of boys and horses in Ireland; He never looked back and fifty years later the Afridi gallery is holding its first exhibition of his work.

 

TWELVE APOSTLES 

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The twelve crystal and bronze chandeliers were discovered by Alessandro in Sicily at the Chiesa di San Nicolò l’Arena in Catania. The church was built in 1702 to replace a Renaissance temple that was destroyed during the 1669 eruption of Mount Etna. 

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Deconsecrated during the Second World War, the church was damaged by bombing and occupied by the Germans, who used it as a warehouse for military equipment and the chandeliers for occasional target practice. In 1989 it was reconsecrated and returned to the Benedictine monks, and over the past thirty years has undergone periodical restoration.

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The chandelier strikes us with an immediate resonance. An unlikely symbol in recent contemporary art, it has been used to evoke the sorrow that lingers after an act of destruction in Ilya and Emilia Kabakov’s The Fallen Chandelier installation from 1997 and as a historical souvenir by Danh Vō in his 08:03:51, 28.05.2009.  

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Found here in situ, Durini di Monza’s series becomes a story woven from the wreckage, which only a camera could tell. It speaks to the role of lighting in establishing the character of a space and to the importance of preserving the remnants of the past that we inherit. It is an approach to which the Afridi Gallery is greatly committed, with its focus on reimagining objects through the appreciation of their enduring elegance. Dangling still in desolation, the lights take on a new life. In the works of Durini di Monza, their accidental beauty is at last immortalised. 

 

THE IMPERMANENCE OF SPACE  

 

Alessandro takes photographs of objects that people do not always see. He says of this series “A staircase just takes you from point A to point B, it is always transient and something we tend to ignore.”