From a very long time Mary Cinque is fascinated by the city and its image, and the search for the features the various metropolises can have apparently in common is a very beloved theme by the young artist. The photography is utilized as a medium of investigation to make this way that starts with a snapshot, an impression taken out by reality, emptied by time and its influence. It’s a snapshot that shows the total image, so the whole urban network, on which Cinque works by discarding, going very deeply into detail.
The careful and selective eye picks precise spaces, spaces acquired as constants, themes that bounce from scene to scene, from city to city: building profiles, roofs, antennas, windows that almost always reflect perspectives beyond the digital camera. A zoom action that goes until leaning over the most hidden sides, the suburbs, the disused and abandoned industrial areas. And then still farther, until highways, roads, urban overpasses that permit us to enter the urban architecture. So also a bit of a highway seen by the window of a bus, captured with a snapshot or a fast sketch, reveals itself in that sole instant.
So,City in instantspresents itself as a experience that contains five metropolitan sections that belong to just one city: five possible horizons, or backdrops of a daily scenography, but also figures of a painting that imprisons the sense of transit, of crossing. These are not images belonging to a repertoire of a random lens that becomes autonomous from the eye, as it happens for the Wenders character of Lisbon Story: Mary Cinque opens wide her eyes to see the smallest detail, taking it back in its serial proposal as the city keeps it. The city in exhibition is an Italian city beloved by the artist: the eye is captured by the details portrayed here, unveiled to us by a process that photographed them, blocked then in that exact moment and then given back through a pictorial reprocessing.
Empathy between city and its interlocutor appears, measure also of the dialogue between the elements that inhabit the space. The result that derives from the painting is the interaction between the buildings, the constructions, the faces of the people who live in that space, who observe it or who cross it, even just for a bit. This is the Cinque’s game of glances between the several aspects of the city, its faces, and us.