He shot the film Site Specific_LAS VEGAS 05 from a helicopter flying over the desert landscape of Nevada and its most celebrated city. The video opens with the image of a solitary car driving through the desert juxtaposed with a colossal hydroelectric power plant. A sudden cut and images appear of the city’s equally gigantic hotels and casinos, defining its skyline day and night as well as its megalomaniac aesthetic and absolute focus on the accentuatedly artificial and spectacular. Only a minimal portion of the overall image is crisply defined in these panoramic views, the rest being blurred by means of selective focusing. This kind of vision corresponds to that of the human eye, which can only put a part of the field of vision into focus. Still and movie cameras are instead capable of presenting the entire image of an urban landscape in homogeneous focus. Barbieri uses the tilt-shift technique, which adjusts the position of the lens with respect to the image plane and also results in partial blurring. The individual architectural structures standing out in the middle of the urban landscape, which has all the haziness of a painting, look like models rather than real buildings. The appearance and substance of the surfaces take on a new quality in the artist’s video and reinforce the impression that the edifices shown are not actually real but mock-ups representing reality. While the overhead viewpoint seems designed to endow the panoramic image with supposedly documentary value, Barbieri’s interest is not in simply providing documentation of the place but primarily in the figurative presentation of a new way to see and understand a place, abandoning any precise and detailed scanning for a deeper sense of atmosphere.

Olivo Barbieri (Italy, 1954)

The works of Olivo Barbieri are fascinating visions, markedly subjective and atmospherically charged representations that highlight the elusive and indefinable nature of urban centres. The artist exploits the inherent potential of photography to conjure up what he describes as “magical worlds” arousing a strong sense of unreality.