Massimo Bartolini

Massimo Bartolini, born in Cecina in 1962, where he still lives and works, is not afraid to confront the artists of the past in his works. My Fourth Homage is a photographic work in which a small group of people is depicted buried up to their knees in the fields of Carmine Carbone, not far from the artist’s studio. While the performative aspect of the work relates to a series of photographs from 1995, in which the artist covered parts of his body with earth as a gesture of “vegetative rooting,” the textual aspect is primarily linked to Pellizza da Volpedo’s Il Quarto Stato (The Fourth State). In the famous painting from 1901, initially titled Il cammino dei lavoratori (The Path of the Workers), a group of people is portrayed walking forward, towards the viewer, and towards the realization of a future in which movement, industrialization, and engines would become essential characteristics of modern life. As the artist states, “one can breathe an air of struggle and optimism.”

In the photographic work My Fourth Homage, the people are still, planted in the earth. It is the immobility, or inability to move, that defines the group of men and women depicted here, giving the impression of a determination to never move again, to never head towards a future that, especially today, connects “the word growth to the word death.” If at the beginning of the century the revolutionary and innovative charge was recognized in movement and action, in My Fourth Homage, it is entrusted to immobility. A wall of people, many of whom are friends of the artist, in their stillness resembles the row of trees in the background, becoming like “a vegetal avant-garde” and thus creating a special synergy with nature. There is a choice of alignment among the photographed individuals and the artist, standing on the side of “the elegance of the tree,” as he himself emphasized, rather than “the dance of the machine.”