Takes, Untold

AgX Photolab is a highly specialised analog film and photography printing studio. Offering high-quality services and a complete range of analog and digital processes, it serves as a place dedicated to the exploration and appreciation of analog photography. It is within this context that Focus AgX was born, an initiative promoted by AgX Photolab and supported by Circus Studios, with the intent of offering artists a space for research and experimentation. The project aims to accompany artists on a journey to deepen the expressive potential of the analog medium, inviting them to explore its nuances and push beyond conventional boundaries. Focus AgX is structured as an annual artist residency, an opportunity to immerse oneself in a free and supported creative process. The goal is to encourage an open and unprejudiced investigation of the possibilities offered by analog photography, utilising the technical resources and experience of the AgX Photolab team. For its first edition, Focus AgX engaged the artist and independent curator Bea Roggero Fossati and Mucho Mas! Artist-Run-Space, a space dedicated to the promotion of contemporary experimental photography, founded in 2018 and directed by curators Luca Vianello and Silvia Mangosio, who selected the artist Luca Baioni to launch the first Focus AgX residency program. Focus AgX presents itself, therefore, as an opportunity for artists to question and deepen their practice through analog photography, in an environment that provides tools, expertise, and an open research horizon. Baioni (born 1984), an artist originally from Milan, develops his artistic practice through the photographic medium. He constrains and deforms it, abandoning the traditional relationship of narrative use — storytelling — to embrace a new method, capable of communicating directly with the viewer through colors and representations that lead to abstraction. His photographs are often associated with a pictorial mode. Baioni’s modus operandi, in fact, scratches and overturns the conventions of photography, projecting himself into an imaginary world dominated by the emotional tensions of the author. Forms no longer recognisable, or animated by unusual attitudes, inhabit his images and tell us sensations that do not seek welcome or comfort, but that emerge from the deepest part of our unconscious. The viewer thus appears as a sleeping figure, overshadowed and observed by the presence and continuous vibration of something unconscious and unknown, just like in the famous painting The Nightmare by Füssli. In this way, Baioni makes us participants in his inner world and the complex realm that runs through him, showing himself before us like an unconscious dream that we can hardly grasp. Kisses and bodies float within this cacophonous narrative, which delicately leads us to live and breathe a photographic narrative with a pictorial breath. In this sense, Baioni’s work is situated in that liminal territory where the image, emptied of its representative task, becomes pure sensitive force. As in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sensation, where Bacon’s painting abandons illustrative narration to give form to the invisible forces that run through the body, so Baioni, with his painting-photographs, imprints on the surface of the image the vibration of unmediated emotional intensities. The result is an experience that does not ask to be deciphered but felt, in which each figure — blurred, deformed, unrecognisable — becomes the living flesh of an expression that overwhelms the senses, leaving us immersed in a dreamlike, disturbing, and ineluctably human dimension.