The fact that Paolo Bufalini’s research has recently turned towards photography surprised me only at first. Although somewhat intermedial, the path taken by the artist in recent years focuses on a production specifically linked to sculpture, installation – more the former than the latter – and, albeit more rarely, site-specific interventions.

To claim, however, that a work such as The Sleeper represents a special case or an unexpected turn in the artist’s research would be superficial, not to say entirely wrong, but the work itself, as conceived and realised, can already remedy this possible misunderstanding. The Sleeper, a rather eloquent title, is a photograph made in two versions – contact print and digital scan print – showing the artist’s partner while she sleeps; presented for the first time in Beloved, Bufalini’s recent solo exhibition in Bologna at Gelateria Sogni di Ghiaccio, is part of the Land of Nod project promoted by the OmniArtVerse digital art laboratory. Not a simple photograph, then, but the physical counterpart of an operation that sees the production of an immaterial work, in NFT format, which consists of a table of the girl’s biometric data (breathing frequency, heartbeat, body movements) taken over the course of one night. This easily explains what can be defined with some immediacy as the punctum of the photograph: the appendage of the measuring device worn by the girl and which emerges, with not excessively revealing sharpness, almost in the exact centre of the image.

The Sleeper is clearly a work whose reading cannot be separated from what in fact exceeds the pure dimension of the photographic image, that is, from the NFT work that is its counterpart and constitutes the key to the reflection that Bufalini intends to trigger. The artist, voluntarily or involuntarily, plays with the ontological statute of photography – or rather with its age-old deception, now a cliché – which has always related image, reality and, above all, truth.

In fact, the only real data to which photography alludes inevitably lies outside of it, but that is not all: the document of the vital state of an organism, of a body, of a person, is not even re-mediated in The Sleeper. The allusion to the concrete process of data collection, at least in the here and now of the photographic image, does not correspond to anything that has actually happened. What we see is representative, the mere simulation of an event that took place in another space and time. As obvious as it may seem – The Sleeper certainly does not have the appearance of a faithful documentation – the operation emphasizes the age-old ambivalences within photography, which the artist accentuates by juxtaposing two works and inverting their significant value: a scientifically certain but invisible proof on one hand, a photographic lie on the other.