A conversation with Fabiola Menchelli: Painting with light
Experimented with the poetic essence of photography, abstraction becomes a space for the expansion of human perception. Light as an artistic medium has allowed Fabiola Menchelli to create her own language, being guided by her intuition and experience, she paints in the blindness of the darkroom to give life to organic photographs. Achieving to extend the capacities of observation of the human being and the traditional interpretations of what photography should be. In direct conversation, Fabiola Menchelli tells L'Officiel about her artistic process.
With a natural gravitation towards art, Fabiola Menchelli felt an attraction to that world from her childhood. "Since I was little my mother brought me closer to art, and when I was 16 I fell in love with photography. I studied visual arts and later did a master's degree in photography. Since then I have looked for ways to unfold my practice to explore other ways of understanding our experience ”, says the artist. She says that his approach to the photographic world began in the most traditional way, in a dark room, and with a 35mm camera.
After experimenting with documentary photography and with more contemporary forms of the medium such as digital photography, Menchelli returned to the darkroom where he began his own interpretation of the medium. Playing with the limits of photography to create compositions of light, where a camera is not even necessary, the artist creates compositions from her imagination, guided by a deep intuition that allows her to create in the dark, without knowing for sure which one. It will be the end result. "My work seeks the balance between order and chaos, using the opportunity that opens up in the accident as a compass to create from uncertainty, and thus, between knowledge and intuition, between success and error, hold a space," she tells us.
When asked if she has any rituals to work with, Fabiola contemplates the processes that involve the medium she uses, being trapped in a type of trance. "To work with the light you have to do it in the dark. More than a ritual, entering the dark room requires a point of concentration and clarity to empty the mental space and be able to work without interruptions,” says Menchelli.
Explaining the techniques she uses to capture her images, the artist talks about how she left the camera to work directly with photosensitive paper and her interest in understanding photography from its materiality, through the balance between sense and reason, of touch. and recognition. "The images emerge as I work, each session in the darkroom is unique. I understand the image in the dark as a choreography of movements, in which different objects interact and generate their own time-space through multiple exhibitions. I finally interrupt the process by solarizing the photographic paper in the developer bath and letting the chemical reactions resolve the image in unexpected ways," she tells us.
By creating dreamlike images that hypnotize the viewer, the abstraction becomes a catalyst of contemplation, where indeterminate figures begin to reflect an intimate feeling. "Both photography and our own perception are presented as open media and carriers of fragmented information. I am interested in translating matter into an image that frees itself from its referent, thus, taking distance to understand other ways of orbiting reality", Menchelli explains, "I think of my work as an observation exercise, an experiment that does not seek to verify a truth but to experience the process outside the logic of the visible and the invisible."
