Etruschi, Polaroid 1984

Paolo Gioli, a historic figure of the Italian artistic avant-garde and an experimenter in the fields of painting, photography and the moving image, spent a few months in Volterra in 1984. He was very much taken by the funerary sculptures in the Museo Etrusco Guarnacci: the marble and opaque terracotta rendering eternal these works emerging from the darkness. Gioli decided to photograph them with various types of Polaroid film to bring out the asymmetry of their faces, their bright colours, the eternity of the works in contrast with the photographic instant and with an imperfect system such as that of the Polaroid camera. A subtle dialectic interplay between classical and contemporary art undertaken with great knowingness by the artist from the Veneto region. The volume is supplemented by a magnificent chapter on Volterra: the classic Sketches of Etruscan Places by D. H. Lawrence, and an essay by the historian of photography Roberta Valtorta, offering a fine analysis of this hitherto unpublished work by Gioli.