Lucida

Lucida is about a threshold. Under ultraviolet light, fluorescent pigments on the skin absorb wavelengths the eye barely registers and release part of that energy as visible light into the dark. The camera records a incandescente body, one that produces its own visibility. This simple physical fact, that matter can be made to glow, is the centre of the series.

The title comes from the Latin lucidus: bright, shining, clear. The series turns one of photography's basic conditions around. Photographing a body has always meant photographing the light it returns: a sun or a lamp strikes the skin, and the skin sends part of that light back to the lens. Lucida keeps the camera and moves the source. Most of the light the camera records comes from the figure itself.

L'opera prende le mosse dalle figure architettoniche di Non nudo, dove la luce dura scolpisce il corpo in forma, e dalle rotture ottiche di Chimera, where bent mirrors fracture it. In Lucida the body becomes a surface to be activated. Familiar anatomical landmarks dissolve into fields of colour and luminescence, until it becomes impossible to say where the skin ends and the glow begins. The image reaches the eye as colour and energy first, and only afterwards as a body.

The series holds two visual traditions in tension. Yayoi Kusama's infinity rooms subsume the body into pattern, the self multiplied into cosmos. Caravaggio's chiaroscuro carves form out of absolute darkness with a single source of light. In Caravaggio, light strikes the figure from outside; here, the visible light originates in the pigment on the skin. Lucida moves past both toward abstraction, until flesh reads as a nebula.

Movement enters through long exposure. Bodies blur and multiply, their trajectories traced in streaks of light. These images accumulate time and show the body as an event. The reference is Étienne-Jules Marey, who in the 1880s dressed his subjects in black, marked their limbs with bright lines and points, and photographed them against a black ground, until the moving body became a drawing made of light. Lucida translates that laboratory method into a hallucinatory register where science becomes ritual and the trail of motion belongs to something half-alive and half-light.

The imagery moves through mythological and ritual associations without illustrating any specific tradition. Faces turn into masks, and bodies into icons of an invented cosmology. The fluorescent patterns translate body markings into the language of neon and render sacred geometry in luminous colour.

Dance reached this threshold once before. In Paris in the early 1900s, the dancer Loïe Fuller, who kept a laboratory for her lighting experiments, soaked her stage silks in fluorescent salts so that her costumes glowed in the darkened theatre. Some of the work in Lucida returns to that meeting of performer, chemistry, and darkness, and carries it onto the skin. It is made in collaboration with dancers, performers, and body artists whose training allows them to hold long-exposure poses and choreographed movement inside the frame. In those sessions, the subject is an active participant, a co-author of the gesture the camera accumulates while the shutter is open.