Insula, Capri in black and white Biasucci: on display at the Certosa di San Giacomo from July 19th

On Saturday 19 July, the exhibition Insula by Antonio Biasiucci, curated by Gianluca Riccio , opens in Capri in the splendid setting of the Certosa di San Giacomo .

An island, over fifty images, a unique vision: Antonio Biasiucci reinterprets Capri through black-and-white photography, transforming the landscape into a space for reflection on time, memory, and nature. The Insula project , curated by Gianluca Riccio and conceived by the Il Rosaio – Contemporary Art and Culture Association , is supported by the 2024 Photography Strategy , promoted by the General Directorate for Contemporary Creativity of the Ministry of Culture . It benefits from the collaboration of the Regional Directorate of Museums of Campania and the Museums and Archaeological Parks of Capri as project partners, and from the participation of the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples and the Donnaregina Foundation for Contemporary Arts – Madre Museum Naples as cultural partners. The exhibition, which will be open to the public until October 30th, presents a work inspired by the artist's gaze on Capri, the result of a several-month residency on the island, a creative narrative of the experience of a unique place of extraordinary symbolic and historical value. Biasiucci's photographs, in dialogue with the works of the monumental complex on Capri, will become part of the museum collection of the Certosa di San Giacomo. Insula offers a poetic and visionary reinterpretation of the Capri landscape . Antonio Biasiucci, through his photographic practice, which has always explored the boundaries between nature, memory, and spirituality , imagines the island not only as a physical territory, but as an interior and archetypal space. Capri presents itself as a natural landing place for the photographer's research. For Biasiucci, isolating himself within spaces marked by conventional physical and cultural boundaries has, since his early days, been the preliminary step towards initiating a process of stripping down the image and constructing new connections between human and non-human things. Stripping back to reveal the depth of things and bodies, eliminating the superficial layers, to focus on the most intimate essence of the subjects.

The images collected during the stay on Capri – traces of remote eras such as the Roman remains of Villa Jovis , details of Mediterranean nature, the Grotta di Matermania , the collections of the Ignazio Cerio Museum , the architectural fragments and artistic artefacts of the Certosa di San Giacomo and Villa San Michele – create a visual score that reflects on time, metamorphosis and the survival of form, in which human beings, nature and the figures of history participate in a common destiny of continuous transformation.

Biasiucci's work reveals a Capri universe made up of "a world below and a world above," populated by the countless characters who inhabit the island and who bear signs of a contamination with nature. In the church of the Certosa , seven large “monoliths” ( 45x370cm), arranged at regular intervals, become the bases to reveal the artist's imaginative story conceived for an archetypal, mythological, cultic (from the cult) Capri . Each monolith comprises nine photographs, each image part of the overall installation, and each sequence becomes an expression of the artist's experience and the presences that inhabit the island: the statues, the forest, the birds, the limestone, the caves, the ficus trees, the sea, the mermaids, the octopuses, the fish, the owls, the goats, the landing places, the marine artifacts, the rocks... Biasiucci conceives the "insula" as an ambivalent place: on the one hand, an island bounded by the sea, a repository of millennia-old historical and cultural stratifications; on the other, a symbol of fertile isolation, a state of inner recollection in which to trace the primordial forms of existence. A microcosm and, at the same time, an absolute stage. The project also engages in a long-distance dialogue with the work of Karl Wilhelm Diefenbach , a German Romantic artist who lived in Capri and whose works are preserved in the Certosa di San Giacomo – which has been promoting photography and contemporary art for many years –, helping to intertwine Biasiucci's contemporary research with an artistic memory that is deeply rooted in the local area. Biasiucci's experience of several months on the island of Capri is also recounted in the video Insulario. The Visual Alphabet of Antonio Biasiucci , created by Valeria Laureano in collaboration with the Film School of the Academy of Fine Arts in Naples . The project is accompanied by a catalogue published by Contrasto and presented next fall at the Madre Museum-Fondazione Donnaregina per le Arti Contemporanee during a meeting with photography historians and critics. The Insula exhibition at the Certosa di San Giacomo in Capri will be open to the public until October 30, 2025 , and can be visited during the monumental complex's opening hours.

Information and opening hours at https://cultura.gov.it/luogo/certosa-di-san-giacomo