Lara Gasparotto – Refuge

Refuge is the sixth book by Lara Gasparotto and spans four years of almost daily photographic practice in the artist’s immediate environment, but also much further away, as far as Guyana, via Quebec and Louisiana.

More than a practice, it is rather a way of looking at the world that drives Lara Gasparotto. A world of outdoors, of flora, fauna, rain, sun, lakes, trees, where her large family of heart evolves, beginning with a child, her daughter Lucia, who is found at regular intervals in the book as a figure who embodies the happiness and torments of the universal soul.

Gasparotto spent a winter and a spring working on the selection of the book. In the end, Refuge delivers a subtle narration without chapters, without page numbers, and where a rhythm is changing. On the cover is an illustration by her sister Lissa Gasparotto, and inside is a poetry text by Eva Mancuso. The two hundred images are a little more than strictly photography: intuitive and nourished by painting, Gasparotto seeks with pastel, gouache, sometimes even oil, tenuous elements of her photos that she modifies, enhances, underlines and then rephotographs to finally, very subtly, move the image from the mechanical and the chemical to the fleeting expressiveness of the living.