October 2025, Callao, Peru. It is here that I come across a publicity still from Phil Karlson’s Tigh Spot (1955). Among those pictured are the film’s principal actors: Ginger Rogers, Edward G. Robinson, and Brian Keith. Slightly worn and creased, the photograph emerges from another time.
It looks back at us even as we look at it. Preserved within its frame is a situation suspended in time and returned to us from a distant past, one we can only partially reconstruct through the accompanying captions. For the viewer, it becomes a form of recovered time, functioning as a Proustian madeleine that reactivates memory and experience.

Yet another temporality is at work here—more elusive and inaccessible. It belongs to those who inhabited that moment: the actors and filmmakers whose lives have now passed beyond our reach. This is a time we cannot truly experience, as it remains bound to the singular existence of those who participated in the making of the film. The photograph rescues from oblivion a specific instant: a moment shared by the cast and crew during the filming of Tight Spot in Manhattan in 1954.

Alongside the temporality fixed within the image exists another: our own present. We encounter this photograph in 2026, bringing to it our experiences, memories, and projections. Through the image, our lives become entangled with those of people from another era. One might also speak of a third temporal dimension: the time activated by memory itself. This dimension is connected to the lives and works of artists and actors whose films we have seen, whose creative activity we know, and whose presence inhabits both our personal histories and the broader history of cinema.

Time, then, does not move in a single direction. Rather, it unfolds across parallel planes that intersect, overlap, and exchange places. Like cinematic dissolves, these temporal layers emerge and recede, existing simultaneously inside and outside the image. What initially appears as a unified visual document reveals itself, upon closer examination, as a complex stratification of material and mental traces. These layers incorporate our own lives as well as those of others, engaging us through the physicality of the object itself: the texture of the paper, the marks left by handling, the wear of time, the stains and scars inscribed upon its surface.

What unfolds before us is a kind of geological formation of memory. Within it lie dormant fragments of experience—ruins, absences, recollections—embedded in what Walter Benjam intermed Jetztzeit, the “now-time” in which past and present suddenly converge.

Why do such images continue to captivate us? Why do they activate these latent, almost messianic mechanisms of memory? The answer resides within the question itself. To ask is already to begin responding. The act of questioning contains its own form of knowledge; indeed, the answer may lie precisely in the continual persistence of inquiry.

It is at the point where question and answer become indistinguishable that reflection turns into recognition. The sustained gaze opened by these temporal hinges is also an encounter with the disorientation of recovered time—time remembered, rediscovered, and continuously lived.

The works of Barbieri, Hartlaub, Finelli, Martinato, and Scotti, each represented in this exhibition by a single work, constitute both the prologue to and the unfolding of this experience of recovered time. Conceived as a temporal hinge, the exhibition offers access—inasmuch as art can provide it— to those mnemonic intensities through which past and present enter into dialogue.
(Bustos Domenech)

SU UNA FOTO RITROVATA – ON A FOUND PHOTOGRAPH
at VSA Volcans Space Asso – Como
Group exhibition
2026
Black Drawings

Running from June 20 – August 30, 2026
Friday to Sunday from 3:00 PM to 6:00 PM by appointment – volcanospressmi@yahoo.it
Via Andrea Merzario 18, First floor, 22033 Asso, Como

Artists
Mauro Barbieri
Daniel Hartlaub
Pietro Finelli
Lara Martinato
Antonello Scotti