Gas Stations, architecture, visual metaphors

Today’s urban landscape includes more and more borderline spaces, places where architecture and context come together and clash to create other identities.
Luca Mattia Minciotti and his camera, or rather, his architect’s eye, identify some of them in the Gas Stations study.
The architecture of brief stopovers, of movement and of repeated acts becomes the key element here, the story in images of spaces which we inhabit, for however a short time, and which have an impact on the land around them.
A formal architecture, yet so repetitively recognisable.
Spaces the author shows to us without people, without cars, without life, in their naked reality: open spaces along the road with an entrance, an exit and a practically obligatory route from one to the other.
By night their sparkling signs with their wealth of messages become a mirror of their own existence, telling us in Luca Mattia Minciotti’s images that they are places which are necessary, but far removed from their surroundings.
The photographer excludes the context by blending into the darkness of night, giving the bare reality of a gas pump all the fascination of potential poetry, perhaps the poetry of our times.
Gas Stations is almost a visual metaphor of architecture which ignores what is around it and implodes in the desire to celebrate itself.
 
Paolo Schianchi

www.lucamattiaminciotti.com