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Swann Art Gallery

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Galleria d'Arte Contemporanea ed Eventi Culturali

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LUCIA ORLANDO

LESS IS MORE

a cura di Riccardo Dellaferrera

18/09/26 - 10/10/2026

Minimalism, even before being a style, is a way of looking. It means subtracting, reducing, and eliminating everything that seems superfluous to see what remains when the image is stripped of what we are normally accustomed to seeing in it. Throughout the history of art, this need has taken different forms, but in every artistic language, what remains constant is not so much greater formal simplicity, but rather the exercise of subtraction: removing to see if, through less, it is possible to achieve something more. It is in this sense that Lucia Orlando's photography can be understood. Her images do not seek to narrate the world, nor to document it. On the contrary, they seem to want to bracket it. Walls, bricks, shutters, metal poles, street signs, window and door profiles, sometimes even human figures, are isolated from the context in which we normally recognize them. Photography interrupts their usual meaning and forces us to look at them anew. From this perspective, Orlando's research seems to move along two different, yet profoundly convergent, directions. On the one hand, minimalism becomes a logical-formal operation, based on reduction and tautology; on the other, it becomes a practice of divesting the gaze, through which the object is liberated from the conventional image we have of it.

Photography as Tautology

The first approach can be compared to the reflections of the early Ludwig Wittgenstein, especially to what he said about tautologies in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. For Wittgenstein, a proposition can make sense when it depicts a possible situation in the world: it says something because it could be true or false. A tautology, on the other hand, is true in any case. Precisely for this reason, it does not add any particular information about the world: it does not describe one possibility among others, but remains compatible with any configuration of reality. A tautology, therefore, is not simply a sentence that repeats the same thing. It is a form that, rather than describing the world, reveals the logical structure through which the world can be thought. It's interesting to remember that the fundamental idea of the Tractatus—that a proposition is an image of reality—is based on the very possibility of representation: an image can depict an event because there is a common structure between it and what it represents. It's a principle we can apply, at least metaphorically, to the photographic image, in which reality is made present through a form that reproduces a specific structure. Thinking about language thus significantly arises from a small-scale image: a complex reality is isolated, delimited, and made visible through a form. Some of Lucia Orlando's photographs also seem to proceed in this direction. The reduction of the image, geometry, repetition, parallel lines, seriality, and the almost total elimination of context transform the photographed object into a structure. What we see is no longer so much something that "represents" something else, but rather a relationship between shapes, surfaces, intervals, solids, and voids.

The image thus seems to approach tautology: it does not seek to narrate, explain, or symbolize, but simply to show, and in this sense it ends up making evident the precious things that normally remain hidden beneath the noise of information: order, proportion, relationship, the pure presence of form. In these works, the less is not a privation, but a state of evidence.

Removing the image from the thing

However, there is another form of minimalism, perhaps even more radical, which concerns not so much the structure of the image as our way of perceiving. We never see things completely neutrally. Everything we encounter carries with it a multitude of meanings, habits, memories, categories, and functions. A wall is a wall because we know what a wall is; a shutter is a shutter because we know what it is for; a street sign is immediately recognized as something that orders, forbids, or indicates. Before even looking at something, in a certain sense, we already know what we are looking at. Our perception is therefore inhabited by semantically conventional images. This is also why the contemporary world tends to present everything to us primarily through its function. The object is identified with what we can do with it, use, consume, transform, or exploit. The thing thus appears less and less in its presence and more and more in its availability. Lucia Orlando's photography intervenes precisely at this point. By isolating a fragment, eliminating the context, renouncing spectacularity and often even immediate recognizability, the artist removes the object from its usual identity. A surface is no longer just a wall; a line is no longer just the edge of a window; a series of metal elements is no longer necessarily something belonging to an urban infrastructure. The thing is freed, as much as possible, from its function. It is here that Orlando's photography encounters the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl and his famous invitation: "To the things themselves!" Returning to things means suspending, at least temporarily, everything we normally know about them to allow them to appear again. It doesn't mean seeking a hidden, metaphysical essence, remote from the world, behind the thing. Rather, it means restoring to the concrete thing the possibility of manifesting itself before it is covered by the meanings we have attributed to it. Photography then becomes a form of suspension. It doesn't add something to reality; rather, it subtracts, and by subtracting, it allows us to see.

Seeing and Seeing-as

Another concept of Wittgenstein's can help us understand this experience: that of seeing-as, linked to those images that retain a strong ambiguity of recognition. The figure remains identical, but suddenly we see it, for example, as a duck or a rabbit. The physical object hasn't changed; what has changed is the way it appears. Wittgenstein speaks of a true "lighting up of an aspect": something, in the gaze, suddenly manifests itself. It is precisely this experience that some of Orlando's photographs seem to seek to produce, as the image does not simply present us with a familiar object, but rather enables us to see differently something that, perhaps, we have already seen countless times without ever truly looking at it. Photography thus becomes a perceptual device and does not tell the viewer what to see; rather, it creates the conditions for something to appear. In this sense, Orlando does not simply aim to represent the visible. He seeks to make visible what normally escapes vision. Not so much the invisible, understood as something beyond the world, but what is invisible precisely because it is too close, too familiar, too familiar.

Between Figuration and Abstraction

This also gives rise to the particular relationship that Orlando's photography establishes with abstraction. Some of his images, in fact, achieve a form of geometric abstraction in which parallel lines, surfaces, intersections, and backgrounds seem to completely lose their reference to the original object. But this abstraction does not coincide with an abandonment of reality. It is almost the opposite. Orlando arrives at abstraction by starting from the concrete matter of the world. Walls, bricks, shutters, metal, concrete, and architectural profiles are not simply the starting point for constructing an abstract composition: they themselves become matter worthy of being gazed upon. It is as if the artist were moving beyond representation to arrive at the object, and it is precisely in this transition that the boundary between figuration and abstraction gradually loses its rigidity. Abstract form is not necessarily distant from reality: it can be what remains of reality when we have stopped superimposing our usual interpretation upon it. Photography can then paradoxically become more concrete precisely when it becomes more abstract.

The Untimeliness of the Gaze

Such an experience inevitably produces a feeling of untimeliness. Lucia Orlando's photographs seem to escape the time in which they were produced. Not because they represent a past world, but because they reject some of the ways in which the present continually forces us to look. We live immersed in a regime of images that demands speed, recognizability, immediate information, and constant surprise. Images must capture attention, be quickly understood, and immediately leave room for the next. Orlando's photography does the opposite. It doesn't capture the gaze: it holds it, and it doesn't accelerate perception: it slows it down. It doesn't immediately offer meaning: it suspends it and forces us to remain before the object. This slowness isn't merely an aesthetic choice. It's a form of resistance, because the way we look is inseparable from the way we think and, ultimately, from the way we act. A continually accelerated perception tends to transform the world into a succession of disposable, consumable, and usable objects. Looking slowly, however, means interrupting this automatism, at least for a moment, and photography thus becomes a small form of perceptual disobedience in which the artist seeks instead to remove the image from its function as a screen, to the point of allowing the object itself to assert itself again. It is a metaphysical photograph, but a metaphysics that is paradoxically entirely immanent, in that it does not seek a world beyond the world. It does not seek an invisible that transcends the visible, but rather seeks the invisible within the visible. The images, therefore, do not ask to be explained, but rather to be looked at. Their strength often comes from an almost absolute nakedness of sign: few forms, few elements, presences that seem to refer to nothing but themselves. Enigmatic figures, silent surfaces, geometries that seem suspended between the concreteness of matter and the abstraction of form. The silence in her works is not what remains when we have nothing left to say. It is what we can finally hear when we have stopped speaking for things, and this is precisely the profound meaning of the title Less is more. Fewer conventional images, more presence. Less of the world already known, more of the world to be seen. In this sense, Lucia Orlando's photographs are truly, in a radical sense, still lifes. Not the death of things, but their removal from the noise that normally prevents us from encountering them. Photography then becomes waiting. And in the waiting, something can finally appear. The thing, naked, silent, essential.

Riccardo Dellaferrera, September 2026