Mario Cresci, BAUDELAIRE, 2017

Starting from the portrait that Etienne Carjat made to Charles Baudelaire, in Paris in 1862, Mario Cresci enters the “labyrinth-Baudelaire”, for which the mask revealed better than any nudity the features of what he pretended to hide. With the series “I Rivolti, Charles Baudelaire” (2013) Cresci opens the challenge: identify these masks, record them meticulously and then tear them off; to deal with the tangle of ambiguity and contradictions that obscures (or illuminates) the face of the French poet. A work based on perceptive modalities, where the image is not in itself concluded, but finds its own meaning within a serial structure, so each card is the chapter of a wider and more complex narrative flow. Forty-six portraits, printed on cotton paper, folded by hand in a different way from copy to copy, like the poet’s forty-six years. Critical text by Corrado Benigni