Un Sedicesimo 34

A Napoleonic soldier meets Death in the Russian winter, a young birdwatcher takes flight and a man vanishes in a vaguely ghostly town. In the three photographic micro-stories that make up Un Sedicesimo 34, The Napoleonic soldier and other stories, Paolo Ventura expresses his bewildering, melancholic and metaphysical poetics. His photographs, which hover somewhere between dreams and reality, are the result of meticulous staging in his studio, small sets in which the artist become scenographer (he designs the sets himself), costume designer, director and actor.

Paolo Ventura was born in Milan in 1968. His works have been exhibited in museums and galleries across the world, including the Italian Pavilion at the 2011 Venice Biennial, and they form parts of the collections of museums such as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Library of Congress in Washington, MACRO – the Museum of Contemporary Art of Rome and the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.