Alvaro Deprit
DREAMING LEONE
Edition of 750
Dreaming Leone involves a heady mix of nostalgia and history and with that, a complex intertwining of different ways of aesthetic communication. There exists a certain kind of appearance, images, that question two things: their origin and the aim for which they have been produced. While their ‘truthfulness’ is mainly a matter of mimetic representation, their ‘goal’ is more concerned with a poetic form of visualization, a knowledge that we recognize as ‘art’. On the one hand, what is being revealed here is the wealth of a certain period in cinema. These so called ‘spaghetti westerns’, however, were already heavily ignited with romanticism and certainly cannot be seen as truthful reenactments of a bygone era and all the more as creations of historical fiction. Meanwhile, the work of Alvaro Deprit is also a photographic ‘reportage’ of the revival of these filmsets and, with that, the documentation of a myth; a registration of ‘retronauting’. History is not a matter of one-way trafic but, rather, something that is fueled by both ‘mimesis’ and ‘poiesis’. Photography and cinema are as much resemblances of matter of fact as that they are a poetic action of transforming and continuing the world, and the images in Dreaming Leone are functioning as the aperture of that matrix.
Erik Vroons
