Critical text by Nicola Patruno

This work continues the expressive form of the visual diary initiated with the pieces “Aphrodite” (2021) and “S*x Diary” (2021-2022), where impressions, memories, and documents of intense, painful, and joyful life manifest in photographic form. The works that compose this series are documents of a vivid, intense souvenir, where each element emerges from darkness, shines with power, and then fades away. The memories are too intense, they burn too brightly, to remain alight for long.

The narrative form of the journal intime reveals the necessity of its photographic poetics: the magmatic emergence of memories, captured in the moment, requires continuous technical experimentation and prioritizes vividness and the visual impact of the memory over a mere formal coherence for its own sake.

Chochana Rosso's artistic practice can be said to be the exact opposite of mannerism, embodying a disregard for form for its own sake. The reason for this gentle contempt is that the content of memory always exceeds form. 

This content cannot be constrained within a predefined, polished form. The content continually exceeds and breaks the form. Each work requires a different expressive mode, almost a self-contained poetics that makes every piece unique.

Rosso's creative process is viscerally analog and constantly grapples with the limits of the expressive medium in each shot. This leads to visual fragmentation, the stumbling that compels the viewer to stop between one work and another to reflect. In the photographs, bodies, faces, mineral fragments, and lunar landscapes alternate. It is a world populated by suns and stones, plants, volcanoes, hands, and waves that chase each other without ever grasping or blocking one another.

Materially, the photos are often loaded with grain, pushed to the extreme by the “pushing” process to reveal a visual world buried in the darkness of the scene. The incessant, grainy waves evoke tears (”Après les larmes et les gondoles”) ; dawns and eclipses punctuate rumpled beds and sheets, witnesses of bodies ; prone hands (”Une ode à ta lumière”) pain stakingly receive the light filtering through window shutters or from the branches of trees.