Chiara Coccorese, born in Naples (Italy) in 1982, has graduated at the Academy of Fine Arts in her home town. Her art research focuses on painting: at the beginning she experimented, in addition to the traditional oil colours, the effects of various materials such as beeswax, paper, plasticine. She studied at Andrea Scala's "Scuola di fotografia" in Naples and gradually photography took the place of painting: in her current pictures the materials research turns into the creation of small scenes that illustrate landscapes or fragments from invented fantastic tales; scenographies in miniature with a painted sky and small plasticine characters, or real people into imagined worlds.

 

Articles and interviews

 

INSIDEART (online) - INSIDEART (press) - "Coccorese, scatti dal paese delle meraviglie" - by Giorgia Bernoni

LA REPUBBLICA.IT - "Il mondo delle carte da gioco nelle foto della Coccorese" - by Ilaria Urbani

HATE TV - "Intervista con CHIARA COCCORESE" - by Angela Caserta

INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES - "Chiara Coccorese e i suoi scatti tra fantasia e realtà" - by Arianna Adamo

STYLE.IT - "Sogno o son desta?" - by Elisa della Barba

CITTA' NUOVA - "L'Ancien Régime di Chiara Coccorese" - by Giuseppe Distefano

LA REPUBBLICA NAPOLI - "Otto giovani autori al Madre" - by Mario Franco

RAI TELEVIDEO - "La scelta di Maria" - by Mariaceleste de Martino

LA REPUBBLICA NAPOLI - "Chiara e Alessia fra fiabe e presepi conquistano il Festival della Creatività" - by Ilaria Urbani

IL MONDO DI SUK - "Il "Magico Mondo" di Chiara Coccorese" - by Francesca Panico

 

 

CRITICAL TEXTS

 

Chiara Coccorese by Nicola Davide Angerame

Chiara Coccorese is an artist who "plays" with photography in a literal and metaphorical sense: "literal" because both focusing energy on creating his own sets; "metaphorical" because when photography's natural objective reproduction of reality is put up for discussion photography itself becomes a projection of interiority. The world of Chiara Coccorese concentrates on another place in which the "myth" survives. This is the comfortable and disturbing world of fairy-tales. Through a stage photography-based narrative approach, Coccorese reconstructs a world using the dream-like language of infancy. This stage of existence is characterized by a gnoseological approach to play: a personal universe is constructed in which the real one is repeated over and over to make it more familiar, playing within it as if it could be available, and tamable. The mythicizing focus is needed to embellish and personify the "four seasons", for example, in order to create an anthropological link with nature, indifferent to destiny and to human suffering, and of which Giacomo Leopardi left an absolute legacy in his Dialog between Nature and an Icelander. In this reconstruction, the artist gets involved through a flurry of activity with mirrors that reflect her image. A conceptual aspect of photography that provides a surreal vision, that is amused and fun, but that seeks contact with the more ideal aspects of taking pictures: authoriality, the relationship between the subject and the subject being photographed and the presence of the artist in the work. As we learned from Diego Velazquez's auroral masterpiece, Las Meninas, the artist can become part of a work through a gaze that makes the artist's authoritativeness evident. Coccorese does this in Autunno (Autumn), in which she represents a female character immersed in an autumn-like scene. The backdrop is painted, the trees are made of fruits and berries, the soil is covered with dry leaves and walnuts, and the woman is made out of wood. Everything is fake so that it is real. Here, the idea of the puppet is put on center stage in a game for which the artist is the dues ex machina, the designer of scenery with the characteristics of a narration that take us nowhere, like a fairy-tale that is partially spun and should be read between the lines, such as the crucified Scarecrow, rather than to be taken for what it is. We expect a story, but the works by Coccorese are connected to a visionary concept that opens a dimension of narration that links the apprehension of a dream and the simplicity of the fairy-tale to a certain infantile symbolism. Coccorese illustrates the chapters of a story that unravels like a dream, like a destructured fable, in which the characters and landscapes no longer stay together but each goes its own way. A world of colors like in The Chocolate Factory, directed by that Tim Burton to whom Coccorese might have drawn on for inspiration if her work had leaned decidedly toward the grotesque instead of toward a more genuine dramatic and playful mood that brings it closer to the theater of the Italian masks that, in the authentic Neapolitan tradition, is teeming with colors and characters. Coccorese's photography starts from where Andy Warhol ended and from that awareness that stage photography has developed, confirming the intention of artists to photograph worlds that they themselves have created. The end of the image "caused by too many images" as predicted by Warhol, who silk-screened photographs "stolen" from the mass media, leads to the end of photography conceived as a tale of what is real and to the birth of a new world described so nicely by a "photographer juggler" like Vik Muniz, through the saying: "There is nothing more to photograph. If you want to photograph something new, you first have to create it". It is the birth of a photography that records a world created especially for it, often for just one click of the shutter.

Chiara Coccorese by Diego Mormorio

Looking at Chiara Coccorese's pictures is like falling inside the hole of Alice in Wonderland. Travelling inside the most possible Carroll-styled photos. The first time I saw some of her work, I felt at home. In the only possible home to live, in which the ordinary is fantasy and fantasy is the ordinary. Where reality is made of imagination that burns like fire inside the planet's heart. If Charles Baudelaire would have seen these images he would have not blame on photography as usual; he wouldn't have said “In these shameful days a new industry is born, that has helped to destroy what it was most sacred in French spirit”. Baudelaire recognised in photography the end of what for him was a real myth: the imagination. In which creative result and everyday life depended upon. Baudelaire thought that imagination is at the centre of everything. He once wrote that “Imagination is the analysis, the synthesis, and sometimes even men capable of analysis and resumptive thought, can lack of imagination. [...] Imagination has taught to men the morality of colour, of decoration, of sound and scent. It has created, at the beginning of the world, the analogy and the metaphor. It divides all of creation and, with matter collected and ordered following rules originated by the deepest part of soul, creates a new world and the sensation of novelty. [...] What can it be said of a warrior without imagination? He can be a great soldier, but if he will ever command an army, he will conquer nothing. This can also be said of a poet or a novelist who takes his imagination away from its direction in order to transfer it to the knowledge of language and factual observation. What can we say about a diplomatic without imagination? [...] What about a scientist without imagination? [...] Imagination is the queen of truth and possible is adjacent of truth. It is concretely connected to infinity”.
To Baudelaire's eyes, photography appeared totally empty of imagination and, for this reason, connected to all the other things that are useless and dangerous.
Watching Chiara Coccorese's pictures, Baudelaire would feel forced to change his ideas. Unless he would admit that it is not photography. Then what it would ever be? Post-photography. Something capable to leave the mathematical prospective structure which is at the base of photography and the so-called reality.
In some of her pictures, Coccorese makes us feel closer to some ancient and beautiful chinese or japanese shapes, some persian miniatures, as well as some childish drawings.
In any case, her world stays connected to western culture. In her compositions we find explicit references to traditional painting as well as initiation. In Mary and the baby, for example, the golden drape recalls the golden backgrounds of byzantine icons, while the hair are like halos and the view in the background recalls the esoteric concept of the dry way and wet way, composed of two parts, one is rocky while the other is green.
In Coccorese's pictures the plot of sacred and profane shows its most fascinating aspect with the presence of trivial objects from everyday life, such as socks, hair curlers, crutches, etc. Objects that are almost like the golden string with which the author sews her cloth made of real and dreamlike fragments.
One final consideration. In Coccorese's compositions, nature goes back to the origins of western philosophy, to our Greek roots. It has an importance that cannot be ignored – it shows all its strength and its eternity.

translation by Iacopo Di Girolamo