In the new exhibition, “frames of mind", PLAY_gallery for still and motion pictures is presenting photographs. These photographs by the artist Maura Donati were originally film stills, which as a result of a special encounter have become independent works and now stand on their own.

With her swayed and seemingly blurred photographs, Maura Donati tries to mediate the invisible. Generally, photography is understood as a kind of "vision" of the world. This could only be true, if the photographer foregoes all attempts at interpretation.

This means that a 'blindness' of the photographer becomes a necessity. When Maura Donati is taking photographs, she commits herself in a certain sense to not being present, in order to become a "view in the image" and to forget about herself. In a world, in which everything has become an image, meaning can only be found in the gaps, in the insignificant, in the surfaces' folds. In the age of the image, the eye has become over-stimulated, tired and longing for rest; its only hope is being able to see the void between the things, the clefts and recesses. The only photographs functioning as a haven are those, in which the void, the invisible is coming to light. Maura Donati is trying to go in that direction. Coincidences, the emotional and automated, the mechanical of meeting apparatuses lead to the creation of her photographs. It is something indefinable that tempts her to press the release button of her Leica at a certain moment, be it on her journeys or in a cinema.

If a photographer "wants" to take a certain photograph, it will never be achieved. This is similar to the experience of the mystic who "wants" a vision. If one does not search for the photograph, it might be encountered. The pictures of Maura Donati are never prepared, nothing is produced, a "study" does not exist, but there is always something that hits the viewer in the eye.

There is something that is common to both love and photography: the impossibility to name it, the impossibility to describe.

(shortened, from: “Die zufällige Schönheit“ ["The accidental beauty"] by Maurizio Rossi)

Maura Donati studied philosophy and psychology in Milano, German literature in Heidelberg and photography in Rockport (USA). She teaches at a grammar school in Lugano and runs philosophical practice.