Alessandro Vasapolli

Career

Alessandro Vasapolli was born in Turin in 1988. He grad­u­ated in Economics from ESCP Europe in 2012, earn­ing a triple degree across Italy, the United Kingdom, and France. He spent nearly a decade liv­ing between Paris, London, and Turin before return­ing per­ma­nently to Italy in 2019.
Always fas­ci­nated by the way human beings per­ceive real­ity, the artist’s ulti­mate chal­lenge is to cre­ate an authen­tic pho­to­graph, with­out any post-​production, while simul­ta­ne­ously mak­ing it as far removed from real­ity as possible. 

Visual Style

During his uni­ver­sity years, he trans­formed his youth­ful pas­sion for pho­tog­ra­phy into a pro­fes­sion, begin­ning as a fash­ion pho­tog­ra­pher before ded­i­cat­ing him­self entirely to art. Entirely self-​taught, he ini­tially focused on study­ing film pho­tog­ra­phy — from 35 mm to 4x5 for­mats, black and white, pos­i­tive and neg­a­tive processes — as well as dark­room print­ing, a prac­tice that remains an inte­gral part of his stu­dio today.
This work even­tu­ally led him to develop a per­sonal algo­rithm which, when applied directly to the dig­i­tal cam­era, gen­er­ates images with col­ors that would oth­er­wise be impos­si­ble to repro­duce through con­ven­tional post-​production tech­niques. All of the artist’s pho­tographs are entirely orig­i­nal, cap­tured exactly as they emerge from the camera. 

Major Series and Works

Another dis­tinc­tive tech­ni­cal aspect of the artist’s prac­tice is his use of spe­cial­ized opti­cal fil­ters, which he pro­duces him­self using var­i­ous meth­ods and materials.

Recognition

All pho­tographs are cre­ated in his stu­dio, using large painted can­vases as back­drops, which he also cre­ates him­self through dif­fer­ent tech­niques.
Because of the high degree of com­plex­ity involved in their prepa­ra­tion, all prints are pro­duced directly by the artist in his own print­ing lab­o­ra­tory. This allows him to per­son­ally over­see every detail of the process and ensure the high­est level of fidelity and quality.

Reading the Work

Alessandro Vasapolli’s work finds its bal­ance in images that delib­er­ately blur the bound­ary between real­ity, opti­cal illu­sion, and pho­to­graphic stag­ing. His prac­tice is dis­tin­guished by a visual approach grounded in pre­ci­sion, exper­i­men­ta­tion, and the trans­for­ma­tion of real­ity through the pho­to­graphic act itself. Viewing his images ben­e­fits from close atten­tion to sub­tle nuances: a com­po­si­tional detail, a par­tic­u­lar dis­tance from the sub­ject, a qual­ity of light, or a mate­r­ial tex­ture often reveals their deeper dimension.