Vincenzo Castella's 'Mimesis – 3rd Stone From The Sun' at Studio La Città, Verona

Vincenzo Castella (Naples, 1952) presents his new photographic work dedicated to nature at Studio La Città in Verona, in the solo exhibition 'Mimesis – 3rd Stone From The Sun'. The title references Jimi Hendrix's song, but the psychedelic component serves only as a pretext to enter the image. The approach shifts from a frontal, elevated perspective to an immersive, close-up view. The unit of measurement is the tree, flower, or shrub, analogous to the 'building' in urban environments. Castella depicts nature 'in captivity'—not spontaneous botanical specimens but floral compositions, fragmentations of previous works, and a new series shot in a greenhouse. He emphasizes nature as culture, a section of the human world, continuing urban development. For Castella, nature cannot be conceived religiously or poetically as an escape from social difficulties; it must be understood as a social, collective, political phenomenon, part of a continuous flow of representations in art history. The adjective 'political' is crucial, juxtaposing the impersonality of objective documentation with the infinite plurality of possible visions. The artifice used is the reference to 'Halo 22', a luminous halo caused by warm-cold contrast around the sun or artificial light sources, assimilated to the blur around the focal point, considering what is excluded beyond the edges of the work.