“A lingering gaze, returned, reflected, rejected by both the animate and inanimate. Curiosity, a flicker of confusion, a flinch of doubt. Expressions etched then burnished away, leaving what in the wake before moving on?
A kind of separation through connection or perhaps the opposite. Distance breeds closeness and reveals the hidden that festers below the surface.
The sanctity of space and spirit and their beliefs become knotted, irreversibly so, with the damaged and derilict realm of physical place and mind. Thoughts and desires haunt faces, a certain unease pervades. Such is the singular attention to the landscape of the face that specificity of local is lost with only hints, glimpses, and muddied details left behind.
Instead, these individuals seem to exist within in-between spaces where each and every unconscious motion, wayward glance, and drifting thought is crystallised like an insect trapped in amber.
Young and old, cocooned or exposed, open to be interpreted or closed like a heavy tome. Each is of the moment and uniquely exposed to its fractious actions. They pass in front of this lens and pass on again, leaving their indelible imprint behind.”
Alex Prior about “Lasciare libero il passo anche di notte”
“A radical rejection of the beautiful photo, so dear to many enthusiasts, to seek evocations and resonances. This is a hymn to life in its multiple manifestations, a hymn devoid of rhetoric, but full of participation. Perhaps this is the meaning of his work, living intensely, without asking too many questions and accepting everything as a gift. There are many visual dialogues present in the book, sometimes sketched, sometimes well-defined. Pasquale's capacity for empathy is remarkable, he manages to enter into the most intimate private life in a delicate way and brings it back with the brutal sweetness that only authentic things have."
Luca Sorbo about “Lasciare libero il passo anche di notte”
“Autiero gets entangled and participates, he slips into things and reality, returning a new melody in the rhythm of a laid wall, a picture gallery with warm and bright tones that dissolve the expectation of an imagined south in a mosaic. The incurable contradictions of the South are returned according to dirty and undefined margins to the eye of the viewer, with a density open to the gaze, overheated by the halo and the fire in the center. An eye that shuffles the cards of the sacred and the profane, the votive shrine and the body, the ex-voto and the showy make-up, the sacred icon and the disguise, but for many people in Naples this is reality brought to the paradox by the important experience of the artist Giuseppe Desiato. Autiero moved by sliding into the body of the South, between Campania and Sicily, Puglia and Calabria, the city and the province, bringing out the color from the shadow, the illuminations flashed by the darkness, stopping those radical and instantaneous contrasts of everyday life. There is a great visual instinct to recompose the inside and the outside, the body and the spirit that he transfers into an image, an unresolved match between the sacred and the profane, and brings, with the energy of a dazzling eye, a symbolic and cultural stratification in surface.”
Giovanni Fiorentino about “Lasciare libero il passo anche di notte”
“Never as in the portrait (with its multiple parallel lives), the dynamics of the context enter the mechanism of the relationship (of a present of the time, now past) between the subject and the photographer, realizing not “the” but “a” specific profile. It could be said that what was shared life in the photographic act reappears in a historicized becoming in our eyes. Each photograph places us in front of the inalienable consistency of a moment in which the action existed and in this we find, in other times, the soul of an indubitable truth (Barthes, 1980). This type of image appears as a more or less conscious attempt to faithfully reproduce the appearance of a person. Whatever the modality in which this work is carried out, there is always a desire for recognition that cannot be separated from the photographic gaze. The photographer, in fact, has his own idea of the subject that he combines by redefining the dialogue with the surrounding environment, according to his own expressive accents. Pasquale Autiero’s work “Lasciare libero il passo, anche di notte” seems unable to renounce to the past steeped in symbols socially structured and shared, but at the same time tries to separate from it through figures he portrays in their contemporary restlessness. The looks and attitudes can thus free themselves from the narrative of the context by fixing themselves in the present. In our postmodern era the cultural correspondences of places have constantly weakened through a continuous fragmentation, a transformation, sometimes a renunciation of the generational recognition of the iconic elements that have become and are now relegated to simulacra. At the same time, the theater of life is filled, today more than ever, with postmodern actors, unconsciously committed to redesigning the contexts of existence with new relationships and meanings, showing other fragments of a different cultural and collective identity.”
Tullio Fragiacomo about “Lasciare libero il passo anche di notte”
“The fate of the neglected, ignored flowers [Unregarded Flowers] is the center of the elaborations and creations of the two authors, the most credible account of Carratta’s paintings and Autiero’s photographs is a collection of annotations that have no desire to follow a dictated coherence from an external, foreign, comfortable entity. The need for the two artists, with obviously distinct path, to grasp free motifs, leaving out the related ones to the world, appeared evident to me. When the Russian formalists elaborated, at the beginning of the last century, their literary theory, which reverberated on the artistic one in general, they distinguished the fabula from the plot, considering the first one necessary for the story, with chronological constraints and fixed structures, while the second, the plot, as the basic tool of literature because it used those free motifs, inessential to the story but the only ones capable of making us see things with different eyes. This is the trait that unites, together with the estrangement, the art of Carratta and Autiero. The two artists eliminate all narrative dross in a path that is made up of rapid and dazzling images, with a surprising internal rhythm that appears to us without interruption, in a single flow of thought. An ability to coin apparitions, utopias, dystopias, to collect those ignored flowers to drop them in the abundance of a visionary rain.”
Antonio Maiorino Marrazzo about the exhibition “Unregarded Flowers”
“Asylum derives from the Greek ásylon, that is, inviolable, sacred; this helps us to find the red thread that binds these powerful images whose relevance remains with the author. We are moving within the (collective) unconscious, or everything that does not belong to consciousness but which, at times, sends us very strong messages that leave us disturbed. In this work there is no trace of confusion, but only a clear vision of the relationship between the author and reality; not a banal mimetic relationship but a recognition of a place, a moment, a person, in which both converge. Note the great ability of the author to use black and white (consciousness / unconscious) to “standardize” the images by placing them in a limbo that lies between hearing and seeing. The faces, always very intense, are the real protagonists of the narration and, especially when they are deliberately hidden, they become very important clues about the intentions of the work. The serie revolves around inalienable cornerstones, such as the anxiety of research, the malaise, and then returns to the whiteness of childhood.”
Cinzia Busi Thompson about “Asylum”