São Paulo

A journey into the urban landscape of one of the most populous cities in the world.

Metropolis / São Paulo_ brings together works made by Ezio Ferreri in 2009, assembled in the compositional form of diptychs and triptychs.

The project is based on an intentional dualism, both conceptual and technical.

On one side, the city is represented according to the classic canons of architectural photography: large-format view camera on a tripod, perspective correction through shift movements. It is the gaze that records, measures, contemplates. From the demolished Berrini favela to the most relevant and symbolic artery, Avenida Paulista, to another icon of São Paulo's transformation, Oscar Niemeyer's great Copan building with its "livre e sensual" curves, to the Edificio Italia. These are places that show the face of a city before and after industrialization, driven by the sudden economic boom and the wealth of the _fazendeiros_ from coffee plantations at the end of the 19th century: a process that led to the demolition of old colonial villas in "arabesque" style and the beginning of a devastating construction phase, leading to the verticalization of buildings destined to house the country's new financial and power institutions. Clusters of buildings that often serve as a backdrop to a horizon of poverty.

On the other side, a second group of works at the opposite extreme: made without framing, with a digital camera, without exercising any control over the shot. The subject is no longer the building, but the steps of the inhabitants, a symbolic trace of their transit through the vast urban space.

If architecture shows the loss of a center and the proliferation of multiple centers and peripheries, the _Steps_ tell of the human condition that derives from it: disorientation. Each person is everywhere and at the same time nowhere. The new condition for the man of the metropolis has increasingly become solitude.

In this dualism, the personal dimension of artistic research joins the ethical one. Ferreri's dual gaze succeeds in bringing into focus both the characteristics of São Paulo's architecture and the social context in which each individual tries to find his own identity, the meaning of his own passage.