West

Roberto Cremascoli, the curator of the work, recognizes in Vassallo's photographs the same experience he had in front of Hopper's paintings: the desire to "be part of the scene" and to dialogue with laconic figures, immersed in a suspended time. These are images in which "there is no artifice" and the characters "have no script": presences captured in their most fragile, sometimes furtive, always necessary, exposure. The scene is "what is available," offered as it is to a gaze capable of recognizing in reality those landscapes of "New New Realism" that already inhabit the author's imagination. In the West, photography becomes a practice of listening and gathering: a collection of souls and gazes that restores dignity to the everyday and affirms, with stubborn delicacy, beauty as an act of human resistance. — Roberto Cremascoli, critical essay on Occidente by Gianluca Vassallo