Chimera

La fotografia promette di catturare ciò che è. Chimera disrupts that promise. The series bends mirrors around the body and photographs what they return: a figure multiplied, fragmented, stretched, and folded into itself, released from the authority of a single perspective. Nothing is assembled afterwards. Every distortion happens in front of the lens, in the curve of the mirror.

The title invokes the mythological chimera: a creature assembled from incompatible parts, impossible yet present. Here, the body becomes its own chimera, a form that holds contradictions.

The mirror is the instrument. Mirror sheets are bent and curved, and each bend rewrites the body differently. Where the surface curves outward, a torso narrows. Where it curves inward, a limb swells, and a little further from the glass the same curve can flip it. Where the sheet folds, the figure doubles and reattaches in unexpected places. Refractive surfaces and coloured or projected light extend this toolkit. In one photograph, a tattooed torso flows through the curved edges of several mirrors at once, the script on the skin bending with the body until lettering and flesh become a single pattern.

The photographs are faithful. The camera records exactly the light that reached it; only the path of that light has changed. A mirror adds nothing to the body. It redirects the light the body sends out, and the shape of the glass decides where each part arrives. Since the seventeenth century, artists have made deliberately distorted pictures that only a curved mirror could set right, so that the eye found order where the picture itself showed only distortion. Chimera runs that old optical game backwards: the body in front of the mirror is whole, and the mirror is what makes it impossible.

The conceptual reference point is Hans Bellmer's La Poupée, photographs of an articulated doll that Bellmer built, dismantled, and reassembled, exposing the violence beneath desire. Chimera moves in the opposite direction. Where Bellmer took the body apart, these images bend the light that carries it: the body remains whole while perception splinters. Other references sit at the edges: André Kertész's Distortions (1933), made with funhouse mirrors; the pressure Op Art places on the eye; and Yayoi Kusama's saturated fields.

Some photographs in Chimera turn the mirror toward the model's own gaze. A woman stands before a bent mylar backdrop and looks at a version of herself that has been warped, swollen, and broken apart; another lies across crumpled mirror film, reaching toward a reflection that no longer resembles her. These images form the sub-series Dismorfia.

Everyone lives with two versions of the body: the one felt from the inside, with its weight, position, and reach, and the one seen from the outside, in a mirror or in other people's eyes. Most of the time the two agree closely enough to go unnoticed. Dismorfia photographs the moment they come apart, when the reflection insists on a body the person does not recognise as their own. The sub-series refers to the way social pressure can widen that gap, until the mirror shows something harsher than what is there. The images make no clinical claim; they visualise an experience. What does it feel like when the mirror lies? Dismorfia received an Honorable Mention in the People: Body & Nudes category of the Annual Photography Awards 2024.