Luca Gilli: Blank
(…) Every one of Gilli’s images reveals a space in which perception is literally confounded by an excess of light which creates a dual metamorphosis, one of volumes and one of materials: walls without boundaries or corners, spaces without depth, stairs that seem to lead nowhere, floors that have become liquid, coloured aplats without matter… The viewer comes out feeling dazzled: as if struck by a brutal flash of lightening, in the grip of dizziness, literally disoriented, as if his perception had lost its familiar bearings.
The chief result of such hyper-luminous effects in this white, or ‘blank’, environment is the toning down or even the complete elimination of shaded areas and shadows, eventually producing a partial or even total detachment of the pattern from reality. Often lacking depth, as if suspended in a gravity-free environment, these images remind us of how the loss of shadow, the cast shadow in particular, is one of the classic themes of fantastic literature. We rediscover these ordinary, now contour-less places, being redefined by the beauty of the bizarre, the unusual, even the impossible: the curve is transformed into a plane, the wall becomes the floor, the corners disappear in an indefinable continuum. (…)
Quentin Bajac
Excerpt from a critical essay published in Blank, by Luca Gilli, Planorbis, 2011, ISBN 978-88-95507-10-1. Original text in French.