Daniele Villa Zorn, The Divine Tourist, 2023

Daniele Villa Zorn has always made collages, using a simple, minimalist technique that could be considered reminiscent of the basic format of the haiku: he combines just two photographic fragments, two images, one of which is generally marked by a tear. Over the years, much of his production turned to the use of images of nature, taken from travel books and guidebooks, mainly published between the 1950s and early 1970s, in which Olympian placidity of natural elements is subversed by the fragmentation and recomposition of collage.

In The Divine Tourist the right distance between the evocative power of images and their pure aesthetic value is embodied by the figure of a special tourist who – possessing the gift of ubiquity, enviable detachment and infinite possibilities of movement – wanders like a privileged alien in this fictional universe. A curious tourist, entranced by the dreamlike material of these hypnotic and mysterious voyages, lost in their superficial, cumulative, extenuating nature, ready to read them as supernatural signs, which seem to require  an act of “divination”, “a systematic method”, as Wikipedia reminds us, “with which to organize what appears to be disjointed”, affine to that the surgical instinct operating in these collages, where the most unexpected fragments create always new, imaginative, associations. Un turista divino – A Divine Tourist.