A photographic mosaic for Jumeirah Capri Palace’s guests

‘It's a shame that imperfection is called a defect’, said Maestro Maurizio Galimberti, emphasising the negative connotation of the term. In his artistic poetics, imperfection is precisely the ingredient needed to create beauty.

Galimberti’s project is an invitation to observe the world through the lens of the photographer, who absorbs the reality and renders it in an unconventional way. During a week in April, a group of guests selected by Jumeirah Capri Palace took part in an artistic practice by Galimberti, becoming the subjects of his photographs. In the new spaces designed by architect Patricia Urquiola, which served as the backdrop for the works, an open and active dialogue was created between the artist and the protagonists of the photographs. Each person, with their own personality and aesthetic features, characterised the images, offering the photographer an ever-changing interpretation of the human being. The soft lighting and almost sacred silence during the artistic practice made the process as meaningful as the final result: a ritual-like performance allowed the master to empathise with his subjects and create narratives that “break through” the two-dimensional sense of printed photography.

The master's favourite tool for creating “visual poems” is the Polaroid, both for its immediacy and the ability to verify the result, and for the possibility of “manipulating” the copy obtained in post-production. It is with the Polaroid that he expresses a personal technique that results in a veritable photographic mosaic. The Polaroid is used to break down and recompose the image into mosaics, recreating the photographed subject and reinterpreting it. The deconstruction of the image into different perspectives evokes a Picassian style, but even more so, there is a futurist echo in Galimberti's works, which are static photographs but imbued with a profound dynamism and sense of motion.

‘There is nothing left to invent, only to reinterpret and observe from a personal point of view’, says Galimberti, faithful to Duchamp's theories, constructing a “contemporary ready-made”.

In Galimberti's poetics, photography is a way of telling the truth, in the etymological sense of the Greek term, aletheia, which means “to remove the veil” and bring out the soul of the subject.