At first glance, Fabio Barile’s practice could be said follow in the long tradition of Italian landscape photography
which includes practitioners such as Luigi Ghirri, Guido Guidi, and Gabriele Basilico.
On closer inspection, however, the images in An Investigation hew to a tight conceptual framework that belie their
simplicity, asking deeper questions about the nature of Time, and geologic time, questions whose philosophical
implications underpin scientific endeavor, human perception, and the unknowable forces of creative destruction at
work in Nature.
The works are tethered to their titles: geological descriptions and accounts of the experiments Barile undertook.
Whether admired for their grandeur, or viewed as documents, the material alludes to the binary relationship
between science and art, and the leaps made by artists and scientists toward one other, in the belief that startling
connections are possible.
The ambitious scope of the work produces a surprisingly internal travelogue of cosmic dimension.
Drawing from the realms of geography, physics, chemistry, and biology, An Investigation borrows from the
multifarious approaches of geological observation and data collection and from the history of photography.
These photographs are about looking as much as we should. James Hutton’s book ‘Theory of the Earth’ was seminal
to the project and the artist cites Timothy O’Sullivan’s ‘Geological survey of the 40th parallel’ as a direct influence.
Echoing early photography pioneers such as Blossfeldt, Le Gray and Bayard, Barile works on an unwieldy large
format camera, evoking the arc of the photograph’s evolution, and linking photography to the bygone days of explo-
ration. In an age where every mountain has been google- mapped and every island breached,
Barile suggests that the only journey remaining is inside the image itself. And indeed, a slow reading of the photo-
graphs elicits what Romain Rolland called in a letter to Sigmund Freud in 1927, an oceanic feeling.
As a juxtaposition to the noble, sombre images of ancient rock and landscape, Barile produced playful,
decidedly lo-fi images of the scientific experiments he undertook that serve to round out An Investigation.
Highlighting the disparity between man’s pursuit of knowledge and Nature’s inherent perfection, the artist used
darkroom and everyday household materials, to replicate (on a smaller scale) the physical forces and natural phe-
nomena that occurred beneath the surface of the earth over the 4.5 billion years of its existence.
How can we conceptualise geologic time? Numbers fail. One hundred thousand years or one hundred million years
can’t be encompassed. The landscape is the only evidential inscription of deep time on earth, both the victim and
the perpetrator of change. It is the immensity of time writ large, in a language we can decipher.