Irina Pignatelli, a conceptual photographer based in Italy, describes her series titled “Losing My Religion” as “fragments of faith and decay.”
“A face half-remembered, a cross out of reach. The divine fades into static, and I remain, searching between light and noise.”
The images are veiled in grain and mist, each one of them like a glance from beyond or a last look behind. Pignatelli is fluent in the language of transition. Her portfolio is a study on ephemeral states of the human body and mind. She strives to deconstruct religiously infused imagery with a surgical curiosity. In her own words, “Not everything sacred survives exposure.” In her work the boundary between sacrum and profanum is blurred and depicted in monochrome.
Pignatelli’s art is an amalgam of brightness and darkness, the sum of all her moments of terror and catharsis. Through surreal and conceptual compositions, the artist crosses the threshold of visual arts, transcending into the metaphysical dimension of visual poetry.
Her poems are more than captions of her photographs; they are faithful, perfectly carved translations. Unexpected metaphors such as “stillborn thoughts” or “swallowing the present” represent mind-boggling illustrations of her skills in multiple mediums.
The artist’s personal recipe of long and double exposure, motion blur, and surprisingly fitting low-key, moody imagery turns her approach into an art that struggled to reach the surface for one last breath. A true self-portrait of the spirit.
Read our “Metamorphosis” issue in full
In the 3rd issue of RAWGUE., 24 visual artists and poets share a common pursuit: authenticity over perfection. The subtle art of becoming, the passage through various stages of artistic contemplation, the ever-shifting states of mind, feeling, and medium, or the act of altering reality to underline emotion or meaning – metamorphosis.
We’re a team of writers using our craft to spotlight art in its most honest form. RAWGUE. started as a bi-monthly editorial experiment where each issue’s theme is dictated by the submitted work, thus removing editorial bias from the equation and preserving a more raw approach. We focus on all forms of poetry: written, photographed, painted, drawn, and filmed.
