Publisher's Description
“Giacomo Brunelli has been looking hard at animals. His focus is not
on the framed and caged exotica of zoos but on the ordinary animals
that remain with us to some extent: horses, dogs, cats, chickens,
pigeons. He shows us a fox, looking sharply at the camera and poised
to flee, and there are numerous birds, a snake and several toads, but
this wildness is small and fragile, living in the familiar liminal space
where manmade and natural meet and overlap. His animals inhabit
farmyards, cobbled streets and the façades of stone buildings. There
are no tigers here.
Brunelli’s animals are often composed only of suggestive fragments.
His spare black and white images are attuned to the nuances of a
moving mane, a silhouetted whisker, a highlighted, almost illuminated
wing. He favours the profile and the counterintuitive angle, setting dark
unobservable features against dark undiscernable backgrounds. A dead
mouse, on its back, paws in air beside an oversized flower against a
stark and distant mountain is no more or less frozen in time than is
the growling dog, eyes alight and teeth forever bared; both are icons
of states we fear but cannot know. These pictures are timeless and
uncanny, powerful in their ordinariness, and emotionally much bigger
than their simple subjects.”
Alison Nordström
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