REDOX

REDOX by Silvia Sfrecola Romani

REDOX means Oxide Reduction Reaction and is the chemical process of traditional photography, the one, to be clear, which used the sensitivity of silver salts to light. Yet Virginio Favale makes it the title of a super-contemporary research in which the images are the result of a long process of highly effective digital reworking. Among other things, although not disclosed, it all starts with suggestions from Japan which, as is well known, rests its identity on a millenary tradition. In this challenge that smacks of surreal metatemporal provocation, red (RED) dyes everything, with an action that corrodes the viewer, sensitizing him, making it a plate on which the images they act, so to speak, autonomously. A surrealism, that of Virginio, which welcomes all the provocations of ingenious games set in motion by kaleidoscopic symmetries but remains sensitive to the melancholy charm of Japan, always present and evoked with a very lucid and yet bewitching. A mechanism that seduces and fascinates, perhaps due to the metallic color that refers to infinity, making Tokyo's buildings no longer identifiable, reduced to bizarre three-dimensional architectural compositions that reflect, modulating it, the light, animating spinning psychedelic tops. REDOX is as dreamlike as a surrealist fantasy, as imaginative as a cubist invention, playful in those combinations of mirror shapes that amplify the limits of vision even if vision is no longer a perceptual / visual fact but a strictly mental construction. And looking at such geometric constellations we enter an oscillating superspace, which seems to change continuously before our eyes or, rather, which our eyes are constantly changing