Paolo Ventura

Paolo Ventura’s Ex-voto series comprises staged photographies in which the author portrays himself in the uniforms of different World War I soldiers. Poised between life and death, these soldiers are mute witnesses to the tragedy of the Great War, stained by blood that could be as much their own as that of their enemy. In these photos, Ventura suspends time, multiplies himself and wears the uniform of an Italian infantryman, an Austrian soldier and a French Zouave. Just as in the eponymous forms of thanksgiving for divine intervention, these soldiers are posing in the ex-voto of themselves, waiting for someone to decide whether they are alive or dead. Here, Ventura alters the precision of the photographic medium through painterly retouching to create dreamlike portraits in which these identities, declined in their different nationalities, observe us with a fixed, direct gaze as if to ask us the meaning of their sacrifice.