Giacomo Brunelli has been looking hard at animals. His focus is not on the framed and caged exotica of zoos but on the ordinary animals that remain with us to some extent: horses, dogs, cats, chickens, pigeons. He shows us a fox, looking sharply at the camera and poised to flee, and there are numerous birds, a snake and several toads, but this wildness is small and fragile, living in the familiar liminal space where man-made and natural meet and overlap. His animals inhabit farmyards, cobbled streets and the façades of stone buildings. There are no tigers here.

Brunelli’s animals are often composed only of suggestive fragments. His spare black and white images are attuned to the nuances of a moving mane, a silhouetted whisker, a highlighted, almost illuminated wing. He favours the profile and the counterintuitive angle, setting dark unobservable features against dark undiscernable backgrounds. A dead mouse, on its back, paws up in in the air beside an oversized flower against a stark and distant mountain is no more or less frozen in time than is the growling dog, eyes alight and teeth forever bared; both are icons of states we fear but cannot know. These pictures are timeless and uncanny, powerful in their ordinariness, and emotionally much bigger than their simple subjects. In them we find scraps of barely remembered troubled dreams, or even the barely retained remnants of that first consciousness that informed ancestral hands and minds in the caves of Chauvet Pont d Arc and Lascaux some 30,000 years ago.

Alison Nordström, Curator of Photography, George Eastman House, Rochester, NY.

Giacomo Brunelli (b. Perugia, Italy, 1977) graduated with a degree in International Communications in 2002. His series on animals has been exhibited at The Photographers’Gallery, London (Uk), Galerie Camera Obscura, Paris (France), Noorderlicht Photofestival (The Netherlands), Daegu PhotoBiennal (South Korea), Angkor PhotoFestival (Cambodia), Format Festival, Derby (Uk), Robert Morat Galerie, Hamburg (Germany), BlueSky Gallery, Portland (Usa), The New Art Gallery Walsall (Uk).

EXHIBITION
The Animals
October 19 – November 4, 2012
“Technopolis“ of the City of Athens
Pireos 100, Gazi
Athens, Greece

Hours: Monday-Friday 17:00-22:00, Saturday-Sunday 12:00-22:00

BOOK
“The Animals”
Photographs by Giacomo Brunelli
Text by Alison Nordström
Publishing : Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2008
ISBN 10: 1904587712