Paolo Ventura

Nel suo studio di Brooklyn inizia a lavorare a un progetto sulla Seconda Guerra Mondiale in Italia: crea delle scenografie con mPaolo Ventura designs every detail and then creates and glues with a great attention to details (floors, windows, lamps, tables, beds, human figures, even the skies). At the end of this process he photographs the scene he created. Not only a historical research but also a recovery of a dreamlike and childlike dimension, taken from the grandparents’ stories about the Great War.

The 2006 cycle entitled War souvenir stands out as a suggestive mise en scene of dioramas, poised between surreal and dreamy, where war lurks more in the subconscious of memories than in the faithful historiographic transposition. The success of the war cycle is international and it is worth books and personal exhibitions, starting from New York to broaden its fame in the rest of the world.

In 2009 he created Winter Stories, an imaginative narrative dedicated to winter, where melancholy and solitude reigned and the charge of transmitted emotionality, was accompanied by a stylistic finesse, also in the even more precise construction of the scenes.

The trilogy of his photographic works and dioramas ended in 2012 with a project dedicated to Venice: The Automation.

Paolo Ventura is the contemporary author of the “photographic fairy tales” that have attracted the attention of critics. This has been a real global success among collectors, included in The genius of photography, the BBC program of 2007. In 2013 two short documentaries were dedicated to Ventura’s work: An ocean of images by the Canadian director Helen Doyle and one by the Swiss Television.

Another documentary was filmed in 2016, a feature film this time, by Danish director Erik Van Empel.

Also in 2016 he began his collaboration as a scenography designer at the Lyric Opera in Chicago and for the Teatro Regio in Turin.

He also exhibited at MACRO, The Hague Museum of Photography, at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome, during the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, at MART in Rovereto and at the Art Biennale in Venice, in the Pavilion Italy.