A few minutes into the mind-bending exhibition Mario Cresci: Geometries/Epiphanies, I find myself in a cerebral standoff with a grid of 16 black squares. This is the 83-year-old’s artist’s first exhibition outside his native Italy. Cresci belongs to a niche of Italian conceptual artists who took up cameras in the 1960s to reinvent cliches of the country’s famed identity. He studied industrial design in Venice and began working in photography after moving to Rome, where he was commissioned to photograph exhibitions of key arte povera creatives, stars of the city’s art scene in the 1960s, during the country’s period of post-fascist reckoning.
Cresci was inspired by the movement’s anti-establishment approach and focus on the everyday, and it came to shape his own bold experiments, such as performances where he unfurled strips of blueprint paper printed with political imagery from the windows of buildings. Later, for a gallery show in Milan, he presented his version of Piero Manzoni’s 1961 work Artist’s Shit, but instead of tins of purported faeces, he covered the floor in 1,000 transparent plastic boxes, each containing a photograph of a consumer product.
In 1972, Cresci painted a black square on to the puckered surface of a white wall, then photographed it on 35mm film from as many different angles as possible, to show how, by shifting our perspective, the same shape could appear completely different. Arranged in a grid, the squares become a schema for self-doubt, querying the rationale of a photograph, and positing the person behind the camera as an unreliable narrator of reality. It isn’t a visually attractive work – Cresci wasn’t especially concerned with prettiness – but it speaks of the muddy relationship between reality and imagination.
Cresci preempts many experiments in the perception-altering possibilities of photography, though sometimes the ideas feel dated. Another of his major projects was first undertaken as part of a research group commissioned to document Tricarico, near Matera. The ancient southern Italian city, with a population of about 15,000 people living in cave dwellings, had become a symbol of national embarrassment as Italy tried to modernise. It had also been romanticised: it featured in Carlo Levi’s 1945 memoir, Christ Stopped at Eboli, Cartier-Bresson was commissioned to document it in 1951, and it was the setting of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1964 film The Gospel According to St Matthew.
Cresci hoped to take a different approach to representing the city in photographs, in collaboration with its residents, neither over-sentimental nor coldly objective, something closer to neorealism. He became so entwined in the place – he married a woman from the area – that he spent two decades there. Tricarico had a huge impact on his work – only a slice of it is on show here, most powerfully in two triptych portraits.
In each, an elderly couple is photographed holding photographs of their parents: first, as an anthropologist might have staged them, at a detached distance, so that the details of their humble domestic surroundings are exposed: battered baskets hanging on the wall with religious icons, a makeshift curtain of bedsheets separating the bed from the kitchen. In the second picture, we see them again up close, a more nostalgic, humanistic study of their lined faces. The third image is a photograph of the photograph they were holding – the protagonists’ parents. A material object that becomes fundamental to our sense of identity – just like the objects we surround ourselves with. But inevitably memory, like history, slips away from us. Cresci uses the photographs not to articulate a history, but to lay bare the way history is directed by manipulations of the camera.
It all comes full circle in a square (which pretty much sums up Cresci’s cryptic logic). Downstairs in the gallery office is a single glorious colour print of one of Cresci’s best-known works, another painted square on a building on a hilltop in Stigliano in 1983. The building carves a geometry that is blank and unblinking against an unguent sky. Cresci’s deadpan photograph, devoid of information or feeling, creates a creeping sense of alienation. Cresci shared the concern of other Italian avant-garde artists, that photography failed to represent places or people.
His visual puzzles give the same sort of satisfaction as doing a sudoku or solving a cryptic crossword. Cresci may not have the fanbase of Luigi Ghirri and Guido Guidi, but this exhibition makes a case for his boundless curiosity. Though he produced incredible traditional portraits, the gallery has chosen to stay faithful to the artist’s intellectual pursuits. Geometries/Epiphanies is a show about the ways in which our experience of seeing the world began to be drastically altered in the dawn of the photographic age. It is about the translation of experience into image, and what falls through the cracks in the process.
Mario Cresci: Geometries/Epiphanies is at Large Glass, London, until 24 May
