curated by Francesca Referza

Wednesday, January 30, 2013 at 6:30 PM, Velan Center is pleased to present Ingar KRAUSS - San Salvario. After his 2007 group show, Paesaggio con rovine (il silenzio-un poco quasi molto), curated by Sergio Risaliti, Ingar Krauss is returning to Turin with a project made specifically for Velan Center. After two intensive weeks at San Salvario as an artist in residence (September 23 - October 7, 2012), Krauss, a German photographer, is returning in 2013 with a selection of portraits he made in San Salvario, a multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Turin, on the invitation of Velan Center, which is celebrating its 20th year anniversary with this project.

The artist says - The exhibition's title was meant to be straight and spiritual. The neighbourhood's name, San Salvario, goes perfectly with the portraits I made there, both for the name's musicality and its inherent sense of spirituality and promise. The quarter is named after the San Salvario church and convent (Via Nizza, corner with Corso Marconi) and refers to Jesus as Saviour. The project began at this church and others of different denominations and religions in San Salvario, including the Catholic churches and the Anglican church of the Waldenses, the Muslim mosque, and Jewish synagogue. Krauss started out on a slow process of getting to know the neighbourhood. The results are unexpected and quite diverse, both humanly and visually speaking. Krauss’ walks through San Salvario, like the flânerie to which Walter Benjamin alluded in Paris' new covered walkways in the late 19th century, put him in touch with the plethora of stories that make up the quarter's life. Weddings, funerals, shops, weekly markets, crowded streets by the Porta Nuova station, and large green spaces of Valentino park all gradually gave shape to the varied humanity portrayed by Ingar Krauss in black and white. Here are diverse stories of immigration, whether long-ago or recent, official or not, as well as old local traditions, routes, and rituals repeated daily. These are stories of loneliness and poverty, as well as entrenched habits and middle-class normality. They are stories of different generations and colours, joined by living together in a neighbourhood whose red roofs have given them all homes. Krauss' choice of subjects is fundamental to his work as an artist. His is the pursuit of something special in the normality of the many faces of San Salvario. Picture after picture, the neighbourhood slowly reveals its nature, at once cosmopolitan and local.

Krauss' attention is subtle and intimate, trained on the beauty hidden behind appearances, a beauty that is not objective, arising from the many outer and inner characteristics of the portrayed subject. Krauss captures this beauty with a rapid look and the simplicity of a few motions. The artist explained in an interview with Jim Casper - Usually, I let myself be guided by intuition when I prepare portraits. I select persons who impress me, who I find ‘unique' in some way. They are normal persons, everyday persons, their singular and unique aspect is in being themselves. My portraits investigate the biography of these persons, the circumstances and the mystery of their existence. Photography is at one and the same time a document and a vision. I try to establish a secret understanding with the person in front of me in the portrait's unique moment, without any form of language, with the intention of creating an authentic moment involving strong intensity and concentration. Krauss' images seem to belong to the 'time of before', to use an expression of Lalla Romano, the writer from Piedmont, who wrote in La penombra che abbiamo attraversato about her father's photographs - The style of his photographs was similar to that of his paintings. The images were calm and lightweight; with no strong shadows or rigidity, like they'd been taken by a gentle hand. Likewise, all those portrayed by Krauss come into another time, distant, yet absolutely now. With a simplicity of gestures and habits, Krauss' camera captures a "time removed from time", to quote Romano again.

After Krauss' debut as a painter, in the mid-1990s, he started to take pictures as a self-taught photographer. Oil has recently come back in the form of painted additions to some of his photographic portraits made in the Philippines (Davao) and in a new series of still lifes and small natural landscapes.  Krauss always personally prints his photos, using old photographic paper made in Eastern Europe, giving his images a melancholic, timeless quality. The soft variations on grey that he achieves with his old Mamiya camera seem to be made by graphite on paper. When we look at Krauss'  images, we realize that photography is not just a matter of technical reproduction; it still has the magnetic appeal of when it was first invented. He has the ability to capture that which is invisible to most, and he seeks this invisibleness in a subject among the crowd and uses his camera to simply underscore it.

Ingar Krauss (Berlin, 1965) has participated in many international photography festivals and shown in many public and private spaces: 2012 Galerie für Moderne Fotografie, Berlin (Germany); Klinger Forum, Leipzig (Germany); 2011 Galeria Cero, Madrid (Spain); 2010 Dong-Gang Museum of Photography (South Korea); 2009 Centro Galego De Arte Contemporanea, Santiago de Compostela (Spain); FotoGrafia. Festival Internazionale di Roma (Italy); International Center of Photography, NY (USA); Camera Obscura, Paris (France); 2008 Lodz Art Center (Poland); Goethe-Institute, Riga (Latvia); 2007 Marvelli Gallery, NY (USA); 2006 Palazzo Vecchio, Florence (Italy); Fotoforum, Innsbruck (Austria); Festival della Fotografia, Reggio Emilia (Italy); 2004 Musée de l'Elysée, Lausanne (Switzerland); Hayward Gallery, London (UK); Fotogalerie, Vienna (Austria); 2002 Moscow Photobiennale (Russia); National Portrait Gallery, London (UK).

We would like to thank Paolo Berardinelli, Lia Cecchin, Chiara Di Dionisio, Gher, Guglielmo Giachino, Sara Latella, Alessia Maiuri, Marco Strappato. We would like to thank for their participation: Music Band of the Municipal Police Corps of Turin, Turin Fencing Club, Teatro Nuovo Torino Arts and Theater High School, State Horseback Police of Turin, Sun Salvario Views, Classica Teatro Nuovo dance school and Tomato Backpackers Hotel. We thank the Suzy Shammah gallery, Milan. The show will be on view from January 31 to March 9, 2013, from Wednesday to Saturday, 3:30 PM to 7:30 PM.