Turi Rapisarda
Turi Rapisarda, from Catania by birth, Turin by adoption, is an artist outside the box, free spirit, anarchist, and eternally young.
Photographer of a thousand talents, Turi Rapisarda undermines the clichés of the idea of portraiture. His photographs evade the separation between public and private, and show a cultural platform that combines artistic expression, diversity and personal relationships.
The photographic images of Turi Rapisarda are based on sharing and reflecting on issues related to ethics, representation, the energy of doing something for a reason, for a feeling and for a community. A pure and romantic vision that constantly returns throughout his journey where, with the care and lightness of a free and anarchic approach, he reveals the dramatic complexity of an uncomfortable world.
The subjects of his photographs move with extreme freedom in front of the lens, as if they did not perceive the judging presence of the photographer.
Rapisarda thus implements an explosive narration of certain types of humanity, mental and existential states, in a relationship of trust with "his people", taken up in a fragment of maximum exposure and vulnerability.
The protagonists of his universe and his point of view are portrayed with their characteristics of fragility and uniqueness, in a poetic, personal and political way, which is built on time, affections, impulses, disappointments.
His work began many years ago and has its roots in a past rich in experiences, lived intensely and boldly, yet always with extreme ethical and aesthetic rigor.
In 1982 he graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Turin, Scenography section. The following year he founded, together with some critics and artists, the VSV Cultural Association, a springboard for young talents and an artistic reference point in the cultural fabric of Turin. Interested in art therapy, he has curated various projects, making four videos for the Health Education Service of the Turin ASL. In 1996 he opened a private art studio, where he sporadically teaches Fineart Photography to small groups of students.
He has taken part in numerous exhibitions in Italy and abroad, including "Turi Rapisarda" (L. Pecci Contemporary Art Center, Prato, 1995), "Il tempo di Beuys" (Galleria Nova, Rome, 1995), “Equinox” (Castello di Rivara, Turin, 1997), “Rave Mutation 001” (Siberie Gallery, Amsterdam, 1999), “The Subversives, art at the price of CDs” with Davide Bramante (La Veronica Gallery, Modica, 2007 ), “I Sovversivi” with Davide Bramante (Art Up Gallery, Viterbo, 2008) and “Entourage” (Dieffe Gallery, Turin, 2009).
Rapisarda has also organized exhibitions of young artists, photography courses, cultural meetings and debates, challenging, as an inexhausted rebel, bourgeois clichés, easy and consumerist choices, abhorring the notorious art "market", even putting up for sale in his works are non-institutional places, portraits of great personalities from the world of culture, framed in unsuspecting times and places starting as early as the mid-1970s.
