Beloved Light
Mario Carrieri was born at Milan in 1932. Son of the poet and art critic Raffaele, he grew up in a milieu peopled by such figures as Eugenio Montale, Giorgio De Chirico and Lucio Fontana and he was close to the painters of the "Existential Realism" movement during the period when Milan became a city of art and culture at world level.

Carrieri's early vocation for photography was infused with all the passion and drama of the human condition that traversed the poetry and visual arts in the fifties of Milan. In 1959, aged just twenty-seven, he published the volume Milano, Italia, the most important work of Italian photography to be produced in those years. Well aware of the absolute distance separating his own art from the cultural and ideological penury that surrounded him, Carrieri then chose to continue his artistic research in total solitude. In public he only pursued his professional activity, conducted with outstanding success in Europe and the United States in the fields of architecture and design, working for figures such as Aldo Rossi, Renzo Piano, Jean Nouvel and Norman Foster and for corporate bodies such as Unifor, Knoll and Tecno.

His distinctively personal poetic, averse to all fashions and the dominant ideologies, springs from the dramatic dimension in which the dark gravity of the land of the living meets the absolute light of an infinite mystery that corrodes every human limit, opening the vision to the dynamism of life. In 1995 he encountered a grave abandonment for which he had lived and worked for years immersed in suffering. In the still lifes of this period he represented flowers as if struck, shattered, by a cosmic light. A timeless light for a timeless pain. The architecture, the objects, the African sculptures, the still lifes that appear in Carrieri's images emerge from a black and vibrant depth like a cry towards the gift of light.
 

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