A critical essay by Loredana Troise, Roccaforte - Bramante's solo show curator

Solo dopo aver conosciuto la superficie delle cose ci si può spingere a cercare quello che c’è sotto. Ma la superficie delle cose è inesauribile

Italo Calvino

Cities, and, again, cities. Cities making themselves up, cities remaining stubbornly the same. Cities that change, cities that subtract themselves to any alteration. But there are also cities always on the move that want to change. Metropolis of our times are not intentional but spontaneous, dotted. Some of them become an intimate and suspended fortress, a fortress to refer to: privileged place of reception.

Davide Bramante’s cities flow marked by cuts and interruptions, pauses and rewinds, by flashbacks and overlays. These cities are inhabited by shots that come one after other. Sides of film that frame pieces of territory: sides measuring these pieces are calibrating those, to catch their hidden sense.

These pictures come after steps, stops and minimum movements. This movie has not a unique subject, nor a definite screenplay. It welcome inside it different materials: words, sounds, visions, images, colours. It follows a coherent edit. It likes to go through the future. It investigates what is located in a further time. And, also, likes to stay, in a different way, into the real times by counting corners, qualities, interstitial spaces to translate enigma of certain things that are generally seen as not valuable. Bramante’s artworks are busy with underlined spaces, touched by sounds, broken vertigos, paused voids: his pieces, strongly anchored to the need to decode the ordinary life simulacra, look for elsewhere. His pieces intuit what does not still exist, describe cities embodying the mega-cities defect – crowding, traffic, disorder, lack of homogeneity – a bunch of New York and a hint of Beijing, a hint of Turin, a hint of Naples, a hint of Madrid, a hint of Cairo…

These are views out of the ordinary that look after a not glossy solemnity and, in the same time, suggest travels into different universes, far from utopian consolations.

Between representation and abstraction, will to compose world’s texture and wish to pass any boundary, the quotation to real sources is re-written in a new alphabet that speaks and moves out of inner rules.

A poetics evolving and materialising in image is come to birth, in the obliquity of steep lines, in the excitement of diagonal cuts, in the energy of broken lines that conduct to identify the vision as element far from itself. And from the known the unknown is generated. With complex correspondences another city is founded on the real one and the familiar is revealed as perturbed.

Non è possibile pensare al lavoro di Bramante come una forma di descrizione tesa a svelare la nuda vita, ma come un codice rappresentativo che riduce la sintassi a una serie di dati logici, ricchi di significati connotativi. (non tradotto, preso dal comunicato)

Bramante’s practice is conceived essentially as epistemologic composition. It underlines what rules the artwork: a unity controlled by the filter of geometry. Bramante invents a play of parallels to create is multitudes and reveals similitude. The artist builds his installation on calibrated plots by juxtaposing episodes, experimenting new designs without introspective means.

Travelling dimension is central in Bramante’s research, he started his creative path on the idea of mapping and deferment. For him, travelling in that coralline barrier that is the city, becomes experience of body perceptive imaginative writing, a way to determine, time by time, the plot of his feeling.

He does not create ultimate images but sequences of movement of body and sight, intentional gesture – dreamed and designed.

His crossings are born thanks to indefinite walks: the photographer chooses to loose himself in the anatomy of a out of rail polis of which he explores voices by following his design and admitting brief casual explorations; he shoots accumulations and suspension, he intercepts pauses, estrangements, sudden discards and please the reason: images are ruled by a shaken and dynamic editing. Bramante stops especially on shots, on empty passes, on perspective changes. On the dialogue between different dimensions. Bramante calls on air squares, streets, markets, assorted and vague spaces, the high and the low, the horizontal and the vertical, the centrality and the vertigo. Places are offering themselves as intersected planes, interposed of relocated presences as crazy splinters; buildings of different sizes fill every corner. Then, some totems – known and reassuring presences – poll, as invincible. By avoiding the unforeseen and approximation, the artist calculates relations, proportions; he places any segment in the point in which has to be. Bramante assembles relicts with precarious harmony. He conjugates multiplicity and homogeneity. He let converge any fragment in compact fabrics, in frames that seem multitudes. A geometrical and exact order triumphs. A rigorous symmetry manages the compositions. It is a universe that is represented and segmented in all the possible references because recall is also building of memory and condition of wait.

 “L’ammutolirsi davanti alla bellezza - assicurava Nietzsche - è un intenso attendere”.