ARS VIVENDI, THE ART IN THE BODY

The body as a mirror of the cosmos, between beauty, spirituality and integrity.

At the end of civilization, man will return to nakedness: not to the unconscious nakedness of the savage, but to the conscious and recognized nakedness of the mature man, whose body will be the harmonious expression of his spiritual life.

- Isadora Duncan -

The title of these pages, ars vivendi, was suggested to me by the subtitle of an old book by Lamberto Paoletti, written way back in 1934: "Naturism, art of living" which I translated into Latin to give this title that aura of archaism, universality and eternity that the subject matter, the human shell and its inhabitants, suggests.

"Thousands of men instinctively seek their well-being outside the framework of civil life, returning to sources of physical and spiritual health that are of all times and that are still available to all. This means, in the final analysis, directing one's criticism on oneself and seeking the remedy in one's own work."

- Lamberto Paoletti -

I started photographing nudes when I was young, I have always been fascinated by the body as a creative tool, as an artistic means of expression and investigation of human emotions. A dressed body is essentially an actor playing a part, it is almost never sincere, indeed it often lies even to itself, reciting in life the script of that comedy, of that character that it thinks it is, that it would like to be or that it tells itself it is. A naked body, no, it is something different, it is a being in its essentiality, with its emotions and its world laid bare, not so much the body, but the being itself, only apparently defenseless. In reality, the model, or the mannequin, who knows how to be naked without problems, is a person who has reached a notable awareness and a considerable inner strength, a personality sufficiently balanced, centered and rooted to not need further external "covers", it is usually a person firm in his principles, who is difficult to move or loses balance. All the models I have had the fortune of collaborating with are people with such dignity and inner strength that they would make many gurus who boast of spirituality to sell pale!

The naked body is for me the symbol of the soul, the man stripped of all his social attributes, of which the abino are the symbols, is the essential man, the being reduced to his essence, to his purity and his innocence, the soul precisely. In this sense, the body is only apparently the subject of the inner world, photographing a naked body is photographing an inner landscape, almost metaphysical. In itself it may seem disconcerting, because it calls into question all our certainties constituted by our symbols, our "armor", the nude "lays bare" our inner world, and if there is emptiness there, then we are disconcerted, but if there is resonance instead, we will discover worlds within worlds, universes within universes, in an infinite succession.

The human body is a thousand things, it is a divine creation, it is a temple, it is a living work of art, it is poetry, it is at the same time a reflection of itself and a mirror of the beholder, it is like a point in a hologram: each point contains within itself all the information of every other point. It is no coincidence that the temples of the ancient Egyptians reflect within them the functions and anatomy of the human body, because for their way of thinking, the human body is made in the image and likeness of the cosmos, and vice versa, and is subject to the same laws and the same mechanisms of operation. Ultimately, therefore, every human body is a symbolic universe, and is a mirror of ourselves, if we see ourselves only as flesh it is because we limit ourselves and consider ourselves to this!

The nude therefore, having a thousand implications, in these pages of mine is not considered only as a photographic genre in itself but is, or at least tries to be, something more that goes beyond mere physicality, or rather physicality becomes a medium, a key to access a broader and deeper vision of reality, matter becomes symbol and metaphor, and the body as matter itself becomes symbol, metaphor, object-subject of communication, object of perception, knowledge, listening (read intuition and instinct). The body freed from its chains, physical but above all mental, behaves like a living antenna, to expand our capacities of perception and tuning with the cosmic and terrestrial energies in which we are perpetually immersed, and allows us to interact with them. The freed body therefore as a surface of listening, of absorption, to know, communicate and blend with other realities, perhaps "parallel", perhaps other dimensions, always co-present even if imperceptible.

Just as photography has now become a pretext for me to learn, travel, explore, in the same way the body becomes a key to access, an interpretative key, and nude photography in the same way, an interpretative key and access to other perceptive channels otherwise precluded. The body, like matter, is therefore at the same time an instrument, a means, a symbol and a metaphor, it is a language that speaks to those who are willing to listen without preconceptions, it is an energetic shock wave that, like an ultrasound, has the ability to destroy (concepts and preconceptions), but also to shape, to transform and to build. As far as I'm concerned, nude photography aims to explore these borderlands, where interior and exterior mix and merge. Interior and exterior, subjective and objective are probably arbitrary categories, in reality everything is fluid and intercommunicating, the body therefore has many more implications than we imagine, it is not just flesh or matter, to be relegated to the narrow world of the bedroom or the bathroom, it has many other implications much more noble and powerful, which go beyond and escape from the narrow and asphyxiating field in which our world tries to relegate it. Naturists understood it well at the beginning of the last century, the ancient civilizations of the East understood it well, where an integration between mind and body has always been sought, and from this integration noble disciplines such as yoga, martial arts, Qi Gong, Thai Chi or the Kama Sutra itself were born, which we Westerners have stupidly reduced to a catalogue of physical positions, the Kama Sutra is much more, just as yoga is much more than just gymnastics, but here the discussion goes too far.

You will therefore find photographs of bodies scattered in different contexts in my pages, not only under the heading "artistic nudes", because I have this tendency to unite, rather than separate... but I am now realizing that I have already used too many words, to try to explain, and when you have to use too many words to explain, you are probably talking to the wrong people, I am sure that those who are "tuned in" have already largely understood, and every word is superfluous, while for those who are not in tune, every word is useless. This is not a value judgment, I understand, but everyone has their own paths, everyone has their own goals, their own visions, their own creations.

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