Bepi Ghiotti

unlocks his artistic process and explains why his works are never still, even when framed.

How can we dig through our wasteful and extravagant existence so as to be able to see the most essential features lurking right beneath the surface? How do we grasp what’s there, that fleeting sensitive moment of understanding, and hold it within us? Bepi Ghiotti offers us the answers to these questions. Documenting his actions through video and photography, Ghiotti moves within his surrounding environment with a delicacy and awareness denied to most.

Every action he takes is carefully calibrated, never excessive and impeccably exact. Stripped of all that is superfluous, his work suggests the ability of going down to the very crux of things.

Ghiotti’s works are active records of the movements he makes in the world. Movement, for Ghiotti, is one of the most intrinsic aspects of being alive and, as such, requires that everything be in communication with everything else, so as to grasp its most natural progression. His works are manifestations of an ongoing, never-ending process which allows only the purest intentions to arise. Ghiotti moves within time, contracting and expanding it to fit his needs, moving at a pace that is uniquely his. Never finite, never still even when framed, his photographs are a representation of the perpetual act of going.

The artist’s longest action to date involved documenting Italian artist Carol Rama in her Turin studio for two years, capturing the sensitivity and freedom of this visionary artist through a slow process of assimilation. The result were highly charged photographs that were also published in the artbook Inside Carol Rama (Skira, 2014). Likewise, in his series Sources, the artist took one shot at the sources of rivers around the world after spending days, if not months, trying to reach them. The resulting artworks are the outcome of diluted actions, through which Ghiotti is able to capture the totality of experience in the fraction of a moment.

In a recent series, Ghiotti has composed triptychs of still frames extrapolated from his videos. They are intended as an edition, and yet each tryptic is unique as it is composed by an exclusive set of frames. By their very nature, each tryptic is different from the others even if the images are taken from the same video. In conjunction with these works, Ghiotti has granted us unique access into his internal dialogue and artistic process. Join us on this journey as, for the first time, Ghiotti explains how his artworks come to life – from the very beginning of the process to the final composition of the artworks.