Spazio A gallery is proud to present Saturday May 25, 2013 at 6 pm, Prison Diary 2013, the first solo show by Alessandro Mencarelli, in Via Amati 13, with a text by Aberto Salvadori.

“Alessandro Mencarelli has been performing an action for quite some time, the action of taking photographs, which might also be understood as creating a stock of suspended moments, blocks of time that presage encounters hidden from us, concealed conversations, groups of unknown faces.

His work as a lawyer obliges him to make choices, to advocate the reasons of one side, not the other, and to take precise ethical and moral stands, with the final result of inserting his images in a context of suspended judgment correlated by the respect that emerges from his chaste restitution of moments of intimate hoping in surroundings as humanly violent as those in a prison.

[...] The photographer shows us empty spaces, presents long waits, rooms characterized by cloying anonymity, in this way succeeding in revealing how much remains concealed. His photos of inmates talking to their visitors awaken our immediate participation in both emptiness and a specific human condition: being seated on a chair. We can all identify with the position of legs crossed beneath a table, fantasizing about how we would be in such a situation and the posture we would adopt, thinking how the body’s gestures are the grammar of our external language, and all the other things we might feel under those conditions. This hint of legs beneath a desk that we glimpse and the photographer’s lens sends our imagination flying in the direction of faces, voices, and stories of which we will never know the ending but will live on in our memory for a long, long time [...]”.

Alessandro Mencarelli (*1956, Serravalle Pistoiese). He is a criminal lawyer and artist. The point of departure for his photographic works is what surrounds him and impinges upon his life, especially his working life, and which also forms the background to his everyday existence. Among the solo and group exhibitions he has taken part there are: Dei delitti e delle pene, curated by P. L. Tazzi, Fondazione Lanfranco Baldi, Pelago, Florence; Sidi,curated by P. Gaglianò, Patrizia Pepe, Florence; Nostalghia, curated by P.L. Tazzi, Assab One, Milan; Empty spaces, Kronenboden, Berlin and Backlight, 7th International Photographic Triennal, Tampere.

Spazio A
Via amati,13
Pistoia 51100 Italy
Ph. +39 0573 977354
info@spazioa.it
www.spazioa.it

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