From 4 December 2023 to 25 February 2024, Accademia Carrara presents Hiroshi Sugimoto. Opera House, a selection for Bergamo , an exhibition project that completes the major exhibition Tutta in voi la luce mia. History painting and melodrama , sealing its contemporary key.

Hiroshi Sugimoto (Tokyo, 1948) is a multifaceted artist, so much so that over the years he has become an acclaimed architect and designer as well as photographer. From a young age he investigated various artistic disciplines, including theater and cinema. Around the mid-seventies, he wondered whether it was possible to collect the entire flow of frames that make up the cinematographic film in a single photographic shot. A compression of time and fictitious reality (the film) into a single exposure which when reproduced on paper takes the form of an explosion of dazzling white light.

In the collection of images Theaters , now renamed Opera House , the Japanese artist's attention focuses in particular on northern and central Italy where, between 2013 and 2016, he created a new series of photographs in theaters in large cities as well as small ones. provincial centers. And in some theatres, in addition to the frontal view of the stage with the screen, a view of the stalls and the gallery is also offered. On display, there are eight theaters photographed by the artist, among the most innovative and fascinating architecture of entertainment. Their design involved capable architects from Andrea Palladio, to Giovan Battista Aleotti, to Vincenzo Scamozzi, to Francesco Tadolini, to Leopoldo Pollack, called to satisfy the expectations of demanding and cultured clients.

In Opera House it is the sense of time that regulates the relationship between photographer and subject, spectator and work. A time apparently suspended, drowned in the white of the screen placed at the center of the image, a dazzling white within which the cinematic narrative took place. An explosion of light that ignites our imagination, simultaneously illuminating the skeleton of the empty theatre, without an audience. A vision more than a representation: the flow of frames as a projection of passing time, within which everyone can invent their own story.