At first glance, Fabio Barile’s practice could be said follow in the long tradition of Italian landscape photography which includes practitioners such as Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, and Gabriele Basilico. On closer inspection, however, the images in An Investigation hew to a tight conceptual framework that belie their simplicity, asking deeper questions about the nature of Time and geologic time, questions whose philosophical implications underpin scientific endeavor, human perception, and the unknowable forces of creative destruction at work in Nature and within the artist himself.
Highlighting the disparity between man’s pursuit of knowledge and Nature’s inherent perfection, the artist used darkroom and everyday household materials to replicate, on a smaller scale, the physical forces and natural phenomena that occurred beneath the surface of the earth over the 4.5 billion years of its existence.
— Naomi Itami
Homage to James Hutton focuses on the aftermath of the earthquake that shook the Italian region of Abruzzo and the city of L’Aquila in 2009.
The series displays images of an antipodal nature to the substantial amount of photojournalistic projects that followed the event. Barile applies a scientific detachment to the tragedy, finding fertile ground for his research in the collaboration with the geologist Antonio Moretti, whose technical diagrams, applied and layered onto Barile’s landscapes, encourage a meditative exercise on the complexity of landscape, its evolution and formation.
