Bartolomeo Celestino Surface Phenomena 2016

BARTOLOMEO CELESTINO

BARTOLOMEO CELESTINO SURFACE PHENOMENA 6 – 24 July 2016 We can only begin to approach an understanding of the nature of our chosen subject through a process of assiduous repetition.

Bartolomeo Celestino has been returning to a particular section of Sydney’s coastal fringe – atop an otherwise unremarkable set of cliffs in the eastern suburb of Bronte – day after day, year after year, to undertake the protracted task of setting up his large-format camera and training his lens downward to the fierce waters below.

In the images that populate his debut book Surface Phenomena, the horizon, the land or any other contextual details are absent; the ocean is everything and everywhere.

The mass of turbulence and white water and the deft flashes of calm that these photographs describe occupy a fundamentally different formal and conceptual space to the iconography of the Australian coast. His mode of practice might just as proficiently be read through the late Modernist prism of seriality. Without the luxury of context – without foreground and horizon – Celestino’s images become loaded with formal, allegorical and interpretive potential. We can only begin to approach an understanding of the nature of our chosen subject through a process of assiduous repetition.

Cover: Bartolomeo Celestino, Coram 151215, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Mi 150421, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Fa 141205, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Ea 141207, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Re 121108, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Sors 140308, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Sol 141204, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Ave 140914, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Coram 151215, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Ara 120604, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino, Na 130201, 2016, archival pigment print, edition of 3, 150 x 120cm

Bartolomeo Celestino (b. 1973) is a conceptually driven artist working across the fields of video, photography and sculpture. Celestinos’ work is concerned with themes of seriality, the return to site and the sublime in nature. Celestino often utilises large format landscape stills as a means of investigating the sublime in the Australian landscape. As a multidisciplinary artist, these considered observations of the natural world without any contextualised details often involve years of returning to the same location, which becomes a site of fascination and a subject of visual research. It is his almost religious sense of process and relentlessness of endeavour – his incessant want to return, reset and repeat – that defines and underpins his wider projects. Without the luxury of context – without foreground and horizon – Celestino’s images become loaded with formal, allegorical and interpretive potential. His colour fields might read as undulating lunar surfaces or glaciers lurching and cracking amidst the throes of the increasingly extreme and unstable changes that are affecting us as both individuals and a society globally

SELECTED WORKS: “Surface Phenomena” Publisher PERIMETER EDITIONS - MAY 2016 launched at ‘Offprint’ TATE Modern London, UK Australian And Contemporary Photography 3 - 21 JUNE 2015 Olsen Irwin Gallery, Sydney. Australia “A Romance Of Many Dimensions” Film Installation 15 -17 MAY 2015 Shot on a Phantom 4K Flex digital cinema camera and projected onto a 30 Foot floating screen at Carriageworks during the 2015 VIVID Festival in conjunction with Semi Permanent. The Installation featured Alice in Wonderland actress Mia Wasikowska.

BARTOLOMEO CELESTINO SURFACE PHENOMENA 6 – 24 July 2016 View full exhibition and price list here.

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