Angelo Vignali’s Flattened in Time and Space is a work in which the proximity to the biographical datum characterises the author’s projectuality to the point of producing the peculiarities of the same gestures that construct the work.

Re-elaborating the poses of a family-visual novel, the author’s work develops around the figure of Concetto, born in Scicli, Sicily, in 1921. A figure and a memory from which Angelo Vignali starts to elaborate a sequence of images spanning over fifty years of history and circumstances.

By sensitively and intelligently combining images made by the author and lent by family and friends, Vignali elaborates a narrative in which spatial and temporal coordinates are suspended and put back into play as a function of a narrative that is accomplished not so much around the author of the photographic shots but rather in the construction of a territory in which the stratification and inhabitation evokes a community belonging.

The experience-memory of things and landscape evoked by the author actually lies in the gaze and expression of a broader spectrum of people. An intersection of landscapes, of domesticity, of colors that give rise to a portrait in which everyone can sometimes recognize himself and recognize his own (at least for once) gaze.

An overlapping of biographies, the one constructed primarily between the author’s own images and those lent by friends and relatives, which is repeated in the relationship between the “direction” and the visual memory of the viewer, who in the impression of a retinal familiarity finds both the expressions of dormant senses and, at the same time, the creative elements useful for bringing this ‘having been’ into play.

Characterised by a biographical interrogation, Angelo Vignali’s work oscillates between the signs produced within a familiar framework and the linguistic and gestural inventions that are produced from these.

Sensitive and intelligent, in Flattened in Time and Space, the author offers us a reflection as much on the language of photography as on the chance to inhabit the image and memory through gestures whose simplicity in no way reduces the evocative value.