Milan, October 2024 – Portraitist of film stars, careful observer of the detail of the human body, capable of portraying female nudes that seem shaped by light and male bodies that evoke ancient classicism: Elio Luxardo (1908-1969) dedicated his career to constructing perfect images of bodies and faces, seeking beauty to translate into photography. The exhibition is dedicated to the great author “The search for beauty” exposed from 27 September to 10 November 2024 in the’Mupac orangery in Colorno (Parma), on the occasion of the 15th edition of ColornoPhotoLifethe photography festival organized by the Color’s Light Photographic Group.
Curated by Roberto Mutti, the exhibition brings together 130 shots of the artist born to parents of Italian origins in Brazil, where he established himself first as an athlete, then as an author of documentaries.
From his father, a professional photographer, Elio Luxardo He learned a lot by working with his brothers in the family studio but when, in 1932, he moved to Rome, he enrolled at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia with the dream of becoming a director. Handsome, casual but above all intolerant of discipline, he abandoned school and entered the studio of the photographer Sem Bosch and almost immediately took over his business, quickly establishing himself as an excellent portraitist.
In his studio in via del Tritone 197 he experiments above all with that detail use of lights that he had learned on the sets and that he found again, as a great and competent cinema enthusiast, especially in American films. Inevitable that they were precisely the stars of Cinecittà they theater actors to love his portraits which had the advantage of never being repetitive because they arose from whimsical intuitions more than from a predefined aesthetic project.
In front of his lens passed not only established personalities – politicians, nobles, writers, as well as actors and actresses – but also ordinary men and women who
the photographer posed to enhance a look, an expression, a posture so carefully studied as to make them all seem like protagonists of some noir, dramatic or passionate film.
Like any good professional, however, Elio Luxardo also knew how to express himself in other fields by signing rather innovative fashion services and important advertising campaigns. They are his personal research striking for their dry and suggestive beauty. THE female nudes and those masculine they are the fruit of his youthful debut as a sculptor but above all they come from his ability to consider the body in a plasticity far from morbidity and rhetoric. The female body has an ethereal beauty that seems shaped by light and designed by a light grace, while the male body is agile, elastic, capable of evoking an ancient classicism but also of anticipating that bursting and brazen strength later dear to Robert Mapplethorpe.
The works in the exhibition belong to the archive of the 3M Foundation, a permanent cultural research and training institution and owner of a historic photographic archive of over 110 thousand images. For over twenty years the Foundation has offered itself as an example of the attention that one of the most innovative industrial realities exercises in the scientific, cultural, economic and social fields.
Carlo Franza