Arrigo Mamone

Photographer and printmaker.
 
I have been working for about 25 years with traditional and early photographic techniques after discovering my mood required slow thinking and gesture. In particular I worked with dichromated gum and heliogravure, there are brief explanations of these on the web site I created for other artists (www.heliogravures.it). After about 2000 I almost completely stopped my outgoings and exibitions, I was never consistent in keeping records anyway, but continued teaching and demonstrating. Recently I focused mainly on setting the techniques I was using with the new digital medium as I realized that the continuous tone film, necessary for producing the 1:1 scale negatives and positives would not be available within few years, as has in fact happened. So I spent a good amount of time carrying out trials again (after photography and etching) learning some computer skills, scanning and photolithography.
 
I produced a couple of portfolios with the dichromated gum techinque, one in gold toned kalitype, one little book with five original carbon process prints, several in silver gelatine (and single composite prints up to 70 x 100 cm). A book has been printed showing photographs taken in the Jewish cemetery in Venice and an exibition has been put on at the Yeshiva University Museum 1990 (New York), about two years later in Venice, and in 1993 somewhere in Virginia (USA). A few other photograms have been used for book covers. I create single heliogravure prints of my work as well as portfolios.
 
I like to create images and messages - even if figurative in general - where the meaning is not immediate or totally evident, but requires a second level of attention.
 
Blackholes - Portfolio
 
The portfolio, "Blackholes", proposed here, requires little understanding of celestial phenomenon. I tried to give imaginative visuality to the sinthetic expressions (not of the event but only of the verbal expression) that try to evoke, even to unqualified people, an immense still partially unknown and surely unperformable phenomenon. So the dark matter, the background radiation, strings or events' horizon, became printable images.
 
For this reason the short text linked to the five images is important.
 
The order of the prints is:

• Blackholes
• Born
• Dark matter
• Event horizon
• Background radiation