Elio Luxardo's Retrospective at ColornoPhotoLife 2024

The fifteenth edition of ColornoPhotoLife, titled 'Totem e Tabù, simboli e modelli tra passato e presente,' is being held at the Aranciaia museum space near the Reggia di Colorno in Parma, Italy. The exhibition features eleven shows exploring photography's revelatory nature. Among them is 'La ricerca della bellezza' dedicated to Elio Luxardo (1908–1969), curated by Roberto Mutti. The display comprises 97 original prints made with a large-format camera, from the Fototeca 3M Italia collection donated by Luxardo's widow Trude Kraus in 1969. Luxardo, born in Brazil to Italian parents, moved to Rome in 1932 to study at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia, aspiring to become a director. In 1944, he opened a studio in Milan's corso Vittorio Emanuele, becoming a definitive portraitist of Cinecittà stars. His work captures intimate moments of celebrities like Lucia Bosè, Gina Lollobrigida, Alida Valli, Vittorio De Sica, Vittorio Gassman, and Luigi Pirandello. Luxardo's cinematic lighting and compositional freedom create timeless black-and-white images that reveal the subject's individuality. The curatorial text emphasizes that his portraits emerged from whimsical intuitions rather than a predefined aesthetic, capturing spontaneity and uniqueness. The exhibition runs at the Aranciaia, a building constructed in the early 1700s as a winter shelter for citrus plants, now home to the MUPAC museum.