Alessandro Bavari
'Sodom and Gomorrah, a reportage from the lost cities'
Guinness Storehouse, St James' Gate, Dublin
24 August to 5 October 2001.

Alessandro Bavari's work is at once strange and familiar.
On show at the Guinness Sorehouse in Dublin, these fantastical images reveal an imagined world where perversity Ð or perhaps simply diversity Ð is celebrated, and anything is possible. Butterfly wings sprout from the shoulders of a woman with many nipples as she admires herself in a mirror.
Twisted torsos wave their arms like basketball players as they glide around a pillared ballroom; their skirts become cages as you notice the small people trapped beneath them.
The calmly seated and crossed legs of a severed body act as a base for a coiffed bonsai; small people climb, their curious heads emerging from the leafy treetop. In Sodom people peer from circular windows in mounds on the ground, in Gomorrah they wave from round pits; both cities feature fantastical topiary and crazy fairground-like skyscraper structures.
All twelve images have a gothic yet modern feel, an almost painterly texture and engrossing detail.
Italian artist Alessandro Bavari uses Adobe Photoshop, a computer programme, to create these worlds and their inhabitants.
Much of the source material comes from photographs he has taken around the world; the people are people Bavari knows Ð at least elements of them.
'Portrait of Nymphomaniacs in the depths of Gomorrah' takes a photograph of participants in a Gay Pride march as its starting point. The eyes of 'Éa Girl Who Looks at Herself in the Mirror' are the eyes of Bavari's girlfriend. The environments mix the architecture of European museums and other real buildings with the rubble from a ruined factory in the artist's hometown. Perhaps it is this that makes the viewer feel at home.
Often with photomontage the eye is drawn to the joins, constantly seeking out the point where one image meets another, looking for the edges within the whole. Not so here, the illusion is so complete it is almost possible to believe these are photographs of real people and places.
By treating the computer as simply another tool Bavari has overcome that barrier that sometimes allows technology to intrude on artistic vision. He refers to Photoshop as being just like a brush, palette or darkroom Ð he knows that each tool has its uses and no one tool can replace them all.
These images marry the processes of digital manipulation, painting, chemical etching and photography. Bavari began painting and engraving and then started to use materials like tar, glue, fossils and bones in his work before discovering computers in 1993.
Working with an awareness of an ongoing tradition, Bavari makes reference to Italian and Flemish artists like Giotto, Michaelangelo, Hieronymus Bosch, Jan Van Eyk. His education in scene-painting and art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rome has left its mark.
Taking Italo Calvino's 'Le Citta Invisibili' (1972) as inspiration, Bavari's description of how he sees Sodom and Gomorrah offers a key to approaching his work: "I have imagined these two cities as a kind of amusement park for visionaries, where my gaze is neither accusing nor benevolent, but simply amused and curious, open to taking in as much as possible."
If at first glance these images seem too polished and somehow commercial, a second and third glance will reveal something deeper: a haunting and very beautiful vision that also offers subtle comment on how we live today.
Bavari's work is available for viewing online at alessandrobavari.com but somehow a small computer screen does not do these images justice.
Far better to gaze as they dangle five stories up among the steel girders and Escher-esque elevators of the spectacular Storehouse structure.

Crist’n Leach

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