Transformations

The subject of Walter Niedermayr’s work is always an environment, whether natural or artificial. An environment with a precisely defined physiognomy, anchored in the present and yet never seen as given fact or definitive. The photographic image is instead endowed with the task of revealing the selected environment as a field of unresolved tensions, questions, enigmatic transformations, and hereditary concretions, the camera lens searching for fleeting, chaotic, always reticent signs. In a certain way, and especially in the landscapes, which constitute the most substantial and best-known part of his work, human activity plays the role of a pathogenic agent, its incoherent signs organized by the artist into a symptomatic picture that opens up to a hypothesis, a possibility of understanding. Niedermayr’s photographs and videos always aim, therefore, to “show” rather than “shoot” something that indisputably sits in front of the lens but is at the same time the result of invisible, off-screen processes: his work is inseparable from the medium and the cognitive will that informs it.

Stefano Chiodi