Silvio Wolf
Silvio Wolf is an Italian artist living in Milan and New York. He teaches photography at the European Institute of Design in Milan and is a visiting professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York.
Education
Wolf studied Philosophy and Psychology in Italy and Photography and Visual Arts at the London College of Printing, where he received the Higher Diploma in Advanced Photography.Career
Early work
"Silvio Wolf is one of those rare European artists of the latest generation, who have based their creative work entirely on experimentation involving the technical nucleus of the resources of photography. They bring out a new world of images that are structurally dense and at the same time distant if not ungraspable. In his work, Wolf constantly approaches the point where photography is no longer the creation of a mirror image of reality, the capturing of an image in the speed of an instant, but the close up exploration of how images themselves form and appear."
- Vittorio FagoneFrom 1977-1987 Wolf explored and studied the laws, language, and two-dimensional nature of the image. During this time Wolf met the conceptual artist Franco Vaccari, whose impact on Wolf’s work can be traced back to the idea of merging the analytical elements of his imagery with phenomenological factors. In the early 1980s Wolf traveled to the Middle East, where he encountered the Islamic vision of space, in which images are in which images are transposed in codes and geometries, containing the concepts of the infinite and the void. These aspects resonated with Wolf, leading him to develop through the series Architectures those concepts that would become the visual and symbolic cornerstones of his entire research: the ideas of “absence,” “elsewhere, and the “threshold." One of his earliest and most seminal works, The Two Doors, shows a Moorish-style door that opens to another door, forming a dark and unreadable zone between them. According to Giorgio Verzotti, this small area is actually “the darkness that allows the perception of light and thus vision and the visual.”
Light, Time, and the Threshold
Though Wolf has developed his practice through a plurality of languages, “light,” “time” and “the threshold” are fundamental themes in his artistic inquiries. Icons of Light are the result of a simultaneous process of generation and destruction: the very light that generates the photographic image destroys the painted one. Of the original paintings, only the perspective frame and the painted surface remain visible, while the light employed in the capture process materializes as the actual subject of representation. The Icons are spatial bodies on which perception constantly wavers between two-dimensional surfaces and three-dimensional forms, between here and elsewhere. Light Wave is a site-specific installation presented at the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009. By capturing long exposures of the light radiated by a film projector without the use of a tripod, the bodily vibrations of Wolf’s breathing and hand, as well as the numerous film frames, were absorbed into a single image. In establishing an intimate relationship between time and light, Wolf questions the notion of time. In this sense, time becomes the critical element that not only gives identity to the image but also the chance to densely materialize it.For Wolf, in photography, the term abstraction indicates "the abstraction from the river of time”. In his series Horizons each Horizon is defined as a “scripture of light” self-generated by the camera when light reaches the film while loading the camera. Photochemically inscribed where the black of lightlessness breaks into bands and fields of reds, oranges, yellows, and white- which contains all possible color, where exposed, the result is the visible form of a coincidence among time exposure, light radiation, environment conditions and chance. Stripped of all external subject matter, the actual object of these photographs is the language of photography itself, not signifying the given but the possible, the embrace of all possible images.