These enlarged macro details extracted from glass works, designed by Emmanuel Babled in Murano, are photographic abstractions that capture the innermost quality of glass via the primal sense of form, colour and line. They explore the relationship between bi-dimensional digital innovation and the virtuous materiality of glass, an aesthetic statement using photographic techniques of the utmost quality.
In Walter Benjamin’s 1929 essay on the history of photography, he proclaimed the medium’s “second nature” as its inherent ability to detach and abstract the visible from the real. “It is another nature which speaks to the camera, rather than to the eye”, he wrote.
The delicate glass surface, which oscillates between transparency and opacity, is captured, isolated and transposed onto a bi-dimensional surface which acts as an abstract, visual and sensory portal into the very nature of the material.
These details were capture by Valentina Zanobelli under the direction and concept of Emmanuel Babled.
Abstract Abyss was launched in Milan in October 2021 as part of Parallel 2021 Design & Photography, an exhibition curated by MoscaPartners.
