Italian artist Filippo Minelli started taking photos of smoke-bombs in romantic landscapes to juxtapose the beauty of nature with the violence of a medium devoted to create chaos with a stunning result.
Minelli became fascinated with smokebombs after viewing them in use during various political protests. Keeping that in mind, the artist chose to photograph many of these smokebombs in a rather unusual setting. Instead of seeing these immense color saturated plumes of smoke arising from the chaotic scenes of a protest, the artist chose to photograph them in a different element entirely.
Instead, Minelli chose to utilize the striking natural landscapes of Italy’s Castle Hill region for his recent works, decontextualizing smokebombs in an attempt to isolate them in a state of pure beauty.
…silence and light are always there, especially in the natural or abandoned environments I look for. If you visit them by yourself you realize there is something that contains the landscape, and that thing is silence. Silence in the desert is different from silence in the mountains, and different again from the silence you experience while stopping at a red light in the city. I wanted to give that element a physical shape.
–Filippo Minelli
I love the concept behind his work and the use of bright synthetic colours with the natural landscapes.
