Artificial Infinite is a series by Argentinian photographer Fernando Maselli. It is a photographical enquiry on the aesthetical status of the sublime, which is represented as a controlled fear that attracts the soul, present in qualities like the immensity, infinity, emptiness, loneliness, or silence. Maselli offers steep mountain ranges whose semi-darkness, profusion, depth and height come together as the visual achievement of what we may call “the terrifying sublime,” what causes a vortex that disrupts the illusion of security of our everyday regulated and orderly existence.
The works included in this series are not constituted by shots taken directly from reality but, instead, they offer landscapes that were recreated through a complex photographic staging, where Maselli highlights, through different techniques such as fragmentation, repetition, proliferation and superposition, the magnificence of the mountain ranges that he had previously photographed from nature. Employing this technical and formal strategy, Maselli points at the appeal of the unassailable, the cravings that humans hold for the unknown strongholds of nature. This recreations, that pursue the bewilderment of the sublime, embrace at the same time, what seems to become still, and since the eighties, the vehicular concern of contemporary photographic discourse: the elucidation of the boundaries between reality and its representation.
Text and images © Fernando Maselli
