A collection of life stories: this is DentroOreto, Umberto Santoro’s graphic work for the OltreOreto art exhibition. In DentroOreto, we are immediately welcomed into private homes, and a sense of intimacy pervades us just enough to establish a dialogue with the identity of those furnishings and walls. Private photographs, drawer photographs, with attention to the particolary and the impalpable, these shots are in fact permeated by a very sentimental diegetic force, which becomes the protagonist of the entire project in its essential role of telling us, attracting to compositions of domestic still life full of past kinetics, who has sat on those sofas now empty.
With DentroOreto, Umberto Santoro confirms his mission in search of the immaterial, of the fanmatic. These are slow photographs in which the artist blends in with the environment to capture its apparently inconsistent but heavy atmosphere, perceiving in each shot that distance between the object and the subject portrayed.
The photographs were printed on coated PVC banners and installed in American-style. The work was completed by a text written by the artist, in which he tells the stories of the characters protagonists of his photos; the text is undoubtedly the document of the expersience that led the artist to develop the DentroOreto series, an experience during which he had the opportunity to relate to the historical inhabitants of the neighborhoods beyond the south coast.
Text by Emilio Orofino, curator of the Project.
DentrOreto is a work made on the occasion of the contemporary art exhibition OltreOreto curated the ONIBI collective, for Manifesta 12 Biennal, which took place in Palermo in 2019.