Images have a really strong impact on us, especially those coming from fashion or advertising; images have the same formal worthiness and the same substance of illustrations.
Colors are sharp and bright – black, red, white or the smooth color of the skin –, light has the typical brightness of the most classical professional pictures.
Poses are highly controlled, expressions are studied; dresses, hairstyles and objects exactly repeat that 40’s and 50’s the golden age of pin-ups, the girls that have to be pinned up.
Here there are the girls, they look at us in frame and they offer themselves to our eyes as if they were images, not people.
Simone Romeo works on popular taste, on the excess of mass society.
He re-presents and re-launches past figures towards the state of being contemporary in an ironic and amused way.
What he realizes is a revival coming from a post-modern nature, a thought dedicated to a mass imaginative world that has turns women into dolls; a visual play among theater, cinema, cabaret, popular invention, television and comics.
This means to highlight how digital presence could be skilful and powerful to the millimeter; this digital power makes real those figures that don’t exist in today reality, thanks to colors perfection, to the mellow absoluteness of cloned skin, to those sparkling shapes that are completely defined and controlled.
This operation gives life to what is virtual in our reality.
This is a dream that becomes concrete by using real live figures that are made as perfect as absurdly abstract from technology.
Dr. Roberta Valtorta
Scientific director of Museum of Contemporary Photography