Translations ZOOM-IN

Start of work: 2008

[It is no accident that today], in full postmodernism, the older language of the work - the work of art, the masterwork - has everywhere been largely displaced by the rather different language of the 'text', of texts and textuality - a language from which the achievement of organic or monumental form is strategically excluded. Everything can now be a text in that sense (daily life, the body, political representations), while objects that were formerly 'works' can now be reread as immense ensembles or systems of texts of various kinds, superimposed on each other by way of various intertextualities, successions of fragments, or yet again, sheer process (henceforth called textual production or textualization), The autonomous work of art thereby - with the old autonomous subject or ego - seems to have vanished, [to have been volatilized].
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press, Durham NC, 1991, p. 77.

Translations is entirely dedicated to the language of the contemporary image.
Through a reversal process, Pignatelli realizes photographs, where, instead of the image, a text appears that is the origin and the essence of each photographic representation of our era.
The visible becomes invisible and, at the same time, the photograph loses its figurative nature in order to become writing.
It is interesting to note that, five thousand years later, we are doing the opposite of what the ancient Egyptians did. They were, in fact, the first to create a form of writing by decoding images. Today we create images by decoding a form of writing - the exact opposite, in other words. It is a kind of total reset intended to introduce a new era of representation.
They are the hieroglyphics of the twenty-first century that appear to be an evolution of Cubism, but in semiotic terms.
In this work, 'signifier' and 'signified' lose any possible link with each other to become two independent and different entities.
Nonetheless, this is the only form of universal writing. It is a global system of communication that is, in its contrary form, incomprehensible to everybody. It is a deconstruction of the visual language that reveals the alienating conditions to which people today are subjected.
Each picture in this project is related to universal themes in order to demonstrate how, over the centuries, languages may change, but not the dilemmas that have always inspired human thought with regard to such issues as birth, death, freedom and justice.