GIAN PAUL LOZZA

Some images are unforgettable. Such as the scene with Alain Delon, Romy Schneider and Jane Birkin standing in mourning dress at the edge of a pool, looking down, silently united in the ritual of mourning, but preoccupied with their own harrowing thoughts. This is the closing scene of ‘La Piscine’ (The Swimming Pool), Jacques Deray’s film—a stylish psychological drama, a Freudian hall of mirrors that is set in high-society circles on the Côte d'Azur in the late 1960s.

In the photographer Gian Paul Lozza’s current picture series is a subject that has resonances of Deray’s chamber drama at the poolside, this glamorous and yet profound film concentrated into a single moment that has become an enduring image. We see a swimming pool in a Mediterranean garden: pines, oleanders and jasmine. The turquoise water shimmers and there is some abandoned furniture at the edge of the pool. It is night and the border of natural stone is slowly releasing the stored heat of the day into the surrounding atmosphere. There is not a person in sight; just a high red-and-white barrier that acts as a reminder that this paradise has access restrictions.

‘Pool’, as the large-format picture is titled, incorporates a wonderful, multi-faceted moment of déjà-vu: it is almost a film set without actors that evokes the specific memory of ‘La Piscine’ and releases an echo of personal experiences. Like nearly all the works from Gian Paul Lozza’s ‘Somnium’ series, ‘Pool’ directly plays with the viewer’s own cultural reservoir—the intersubjective storehouse of images and stories that has developed in popular culture. ‘Pool’ evokes a multi-layered and multi-faceted network of narrative experiences and does not shrink away from what can be threatening scenarios that issue from the subconscious. ‘This is a journey into the depths of the human psyche’, says Gian Paul Lozza. ‘It is dark and melancholy there. The viewer is abandoned to himself. The film of the internal images takes him captive and leads him into unknown recesses of his consciousness’.

Lozza’s series is an attempt at a typology. So there are no living creatures to be seen in the photographs, nor is there the slightest sign of any active movement. The pictures are mute, silent and frozen in the subdued nocturnal low-light. And yet they reveal some traces of civilisation: a faintly lit window in a backyard (‘Backyard’), two barrels on a platform (‘Barrels’), a visitor’s ramp on the glacier tongue (‘Glacier’), a stratified pile of dead wood at the edge of a forest (‘Wood Pile’). This gives rise to a precise, temporally graduated progression from the absent action in the past to its physical evidence and then to the presence of the photographer who encounters these traces and documents them to create a de-subjectivised, distinctly non-anecdotal visual space that the viewers can bring to life in turn with their own store of associations.

Lozza also calls his landscape photographs ‘Metascapes’, providing a further allusion to a cultural-historical reference system that includes the landscape painting of the 19th century. Lozza photographs exclusively at night in order to focus in on the structural visual objects. The colours therefore generate a pallid impression that leads to a painterly haziness. Associations are generated here to the imposing, almost abstract evening pictures of the Romantic William Turner, whose engagement with landscape has permanently changed how we represent the experience of nature. Gian Paul Lozza’s enigmatic visual worlds also involve changes in perception: his unpopulated landscapes certainly flirt with the concept of beauty but they insistently demand an engagement both with immediately existing realities and with photographic and cultural realities.

Christoph Doswald

Powerful, vast and mesmerising, Gian Paul Lozza’s Somnium (literally, a dream-like state) seems firmly at home within the inviting arena of Leigh-on-Sea’s Francesca Maffeo Gallery; a modern, deceivingly spacious gallery in which attention to aesthetic and design is no less than immaculate. The result here is a curated visual journey shaped meticulously from memory; a collection of metascapes as Lozza describes them, in which scenes of intrigue and wonder are plentiful.
Creating a series of images strictly by moonlight (or a calculated lack of full ambient daylight) is not a task worthy of being down-played. There is both an admirable tenacity and artistic resilience in working within the hours that heighten innate human senses and anxieties, not forgetting the technical challenges faced when approaching and framing scenes in accordance with the night. Any contender would have to fully embrace the limitations and capabilities of a mechanical iris to even have half the chance of producing anything worth keeping. In the case of Somnium, images such as ‘Sea’: a pale turquoise seascape with waters merging into the greyed infinity of mist, or ‘Container’ in which a vivid blue container is captured against what appears to be snow-laden clouds in the background, are enough to invoke a sense of transcendental romanticism and awe at their very creation.
Where Lozza’s Somnium succeeds from the onset, is in its ability to take audiences to these scenes he has visited, presenting each image with the very intimacy and palpability of his own experiences. The snow in ‘Snow Peak’ for example, feels so close that it can be touched; the colourful objects within the shrine in ‘Memorial’, so vivid that they seem but a stone’s-throw away. With many images from the series (‘Tube’, ‘Container’ and ‘Memorial’ standing out as strong examples) created using something close to a telephoto lens, we are spared any visual distractions within the scene, and given the purest reproduction of his memory of the place in question. Each inanimate, focal subject in their frames have their importances affirmed, one by one serving as visual bookmarks within the artist’s own mental tome.
Larger, isolated images such as ‘Stage’ and ‘Shrubs’ demand full concentration; their beauty and scale unable to be digested at first glance. In the case of the latter, it’s dark, repetitive visual infinity is full of such order that suggesting it was digitally manipulated would be a fair (yet incorrect) deduction. ‘Pool’ and ‘Backyard’, also have distinct appeal. Both seem frustratingly familiar, laced with nuances of nostalgic aspects of cinema and television, playing upon notions of night-induced anxiety and the tension surrounding the purpose built human spaces. With one representing suburbia and the other, the metropolitan, they both contain a respective dramatic edge. The desolation in ‘Pool’ invokes many questions and yet answers none, awash with so much dusky haze that making out all of its intricacies proves impossibly eerie. Experiencing it with glassless framing breaks a certain barrier of intimacy; the removal of any hindering light-reflection inviting eyes to wonder across the merging of microscopic shadowy pixels. ‘Backyard’ does a similar visual job successfully, yet remains the sore thumb of the series. With it being the sole image devoid of any natural element (flora, landscape or otherwise), it feels better suited as an eerie, yet striking stand-alone image.
Although an ongoing series and one that was created on a trial and error basis (as Lozza himself says), Somnium does appear to have a number of recurring themes. Several images (‘Glacier’, ‘Stand’, ‘Satellite Dish I’) convey a harmony between man’s audacious constructions of the past and the land in which they sit, decaying and crumbling like neolithic relics. Infinitely vast landscapes make up most of the series too, covering the likes of layered snow-dunes, dense woodland or arid brush. The most prevalent theme throughout the series however, is that of desolation: the series is completely devoid of direct human presence. With that in mind, these dream-like scapes are very easy to be imagined as if post-apocalyptic scenes in which the elements have reclaimed the very lands in which they were made to share.
Fabled or not, the Shangri-La-like like transformation of the gallery space for its six week duration is one that allows viewers to travel to some of the most isolated, yet beautiful places on Earth, and share a glimpse into the mental journey of the man who will take them there.


reviewed for Photomonitor by Dorrell Merritt