Faced with Carlo Rocchi Bilancini’s disquieting images, one realises the futility of any search for Truth. The very notion of Truth seems to dissolve in them, and the search for Reality loses any inherent or meaningful purpose. Such a pursuit would be pointless, perhaps even destructive.
It would be just as useless to query the truth of the scene in Curzio Malaparte (La pelle, 1949), in which he describes a meal served to American officers in Naples in 1943. Because of the temporary ban on deep-sea fishing, they are served exotic fish from the city Aquarium, among which is a large mermaid (Siren Lacertina) with an unnerving resemblance to a child.
Rocchi Bilancini’s photographs go beyond the eternal dialectic between Truth and Fiction to show us the human body in an entirely unusual – though not necessarily unattainable – dimension. He takes the representative route, which nevertheless transcends reality, and enters into pure Surrealism, where the oneiric component becomes the means for escaping the constraints of conscious rationality and social convention.
These images represent just what they are: portraits of people dressed and somehow determined to immerse themselves in unrecognisable swimming pools, where water is the common element, but also that which inspires them to manifest diverse personalities. It matters little where the observer’s psyche is led when one realises that fantasies and dreams are but cruel reflections of reality: consider the surreal films of Luis Buñuel (Un chien andalou, 1928; L’âge d’or, 1930).
Today, Rocchi Bilancini’s images, the culmination of four years’ work and the fruit of his cinematographic experience, are presented in a surreal context, itself intolerant of the dialectic Truth vs Falsehood. For here are swimming pools that are, as usual, full of water, yet nevertheless rendered temporarily inadequate because they hold clothed bodies; they are however shown in a pool which is curiously empty, yet just right for presenting Rocchi Bilancini’s photos.
The whole, on an island in the Venetian lagoon, in a city where the term “Piscina” is a toponomastic reference, water is constantly visible and audible and the soaking of a dressed figure is a frequent and accepted sight during the acqua alta...
Only by abandoning the question – True or False? - can the viewer immerse himself solely in the images; wandering clothed and dry in a place where more appropriately, he would be nude, and wet.
Umberto Morera
