MIMMO JODICE
The landscape of thought, Gibellina 1980/1981/1982
When Mimmo Jodice arrived in Gibellina, he found a contemporary version of ‘The Ideal City.’ Gibellina is a new town thought up from scratch on the drawing board and still uninhabited. The celebrated Neapolitan photographer captures the town in the precise instance between the completion of the building work and the arrival of its inhabitants. It is a perfect harmonic void, yet one into which the first tentative signs of the arrival of man have been knowingly introduced.
The power of his images lies in the depiction of this moment of suspension, in which utopia becomes reality and the urban landscape appears as a motionless forest, poised in meditative, timeless silence soon to be shattered by the storm.
During his many trips to Gibellina (1980/1981/1982), Jodice created a new landscape, leaving history behind to view the city as a laboratory in movement. The study became a source of inspiration for his 1980s explorations of landscape as meditative space.
BIO
Mimmo Jodice is a reference name in the history of Italian photography. He lives and works in Naples where he was born in 1934. Since the sixties as an autodidact he approaches photography feeling involved in experiments and researches on materials and on different ways of processing photography, using them not only as a descriptive mean but also as a creative one. In 1980 he published Vedute di Napoli from those Jodice starts an inquiry on reality, working on a definition of an empty and alarming urban space of metaphysical memories. This research marks a turn in his language and a revision of its iconography: his photographs will always be more distant from reality and always more immersed in a visionary and silent dimension. In 1985 he began an intensive research into the myth of the Mediterranean: the result was a book, Mediterraneo, published in 1995 by Aperture Foundation and an exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In those same years, Jodice exhibited Confini at the Wan Fung Gallery in Beijing in the Imperial Archives. In 2009 Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome dedicated an important thorough anthology to him. In 2011 he is invited by the Louvre Museum for a personal exhibition with a new job Les Yeux du Louvre. In 2016 the Museum of Contemporary Art MADRE in Naples dedicated to Mimmo Jodice the largest and most complete retrospective. In 2018 the exhaustive monograph of all this work was entitled Mimmo Jodice. Attesa/ Waiting (da/ from 1960).