A voyage is the expression of a motion activity of the mind and the body and is affected by means of the body and, ideally, the thoughts. Man has correlated his experience in movement with the physical traits of a varied means of locomotion in history, from the horse to motor vehicle.

The fashion photographer Jeff Bark (born in 1963 in Minnesota with studio in N.Y.) started with the concept of Grand Tour mediating it in the visionary introspection of the conscience of the poet. He placed the city of Rome at the center of this visual project and projected it in the couch of the four-wheeler (his garage in upstate New York) until realizing the emanation of the paresis which characterizes the shelter of the car in favor of a third dimension.

Through the “Garage” he has condensed the synthesis of tour which human knowledge collects in the semantics of his existence: a neo-romantic of the course undertaken and the sum of the dialogue with the history of beauty, life aimed at harmony and perfection, until reaching abrasion as the center of an emotive beauty which includes all and which generates the restart of a work of art.

In Bark’s vision, the enlarged perspective of inclusion becomes a flight from a place for the dreamlike elsewhere which is triumphant in the courage to open our eyes and accept ourselves daily. A design of us, plausible and justifiable in existence, authors of an historical portrait which is already such in the ego. Borrowing from the wise citations of the Art masters of 17th Century, as well as the space-time measures of Tarkovskij and the Illuminist excitements of the most authentic Merisi, the photographer attracts the scenes in narrative sequence and rivaling the human, from in front of and behind the perspective, giving us psychic glimpses of the inanimate like the vegetable equal to man as a question to existence.

Nature was never as alive as it was in the “still life” Elizabethan age.

The face of the divine was never more earthly than in the era of the pontificate of Pope Paul V Borghese.

The match between the vision of an identity and the appearance of truth is the hybrid of the contents generated in this singular dispute between life and fineness and this romantic trace with which Bark impregnates the existence of his creations.

At the Palazzo delle Esposizioni of Rome, from 7 June to 28 July, under the curatorship of Alessio de’ Navasques, we cross the Eden of human thought as a tangible experience of how we can remain in one place and beyond it simultaneously.

The exhibition bears in the title the name of its author as an intimate course which he undertakes in the uterus of his photogrammetric experience. The place in which this takes place is his imagination which geolocalizes from the soul within the walls of his garage, not portraying what is shown in its meeting with the eye pupil, but what is elaborated by the same encounter via the force of the aorta which transmits vibrating pulses to the ribcage in the experience of a heavenly projection of its truth.

Jeff Bark – Paradise Garage

The symbology adopted, leading back to the artist’s personal sphere, are universal themes that cross the history of art and in particular the verticality of the building principles of the spirit.

This upward motion and directionally controvertible looks at the Baroque, but in a modern key where the horizon is always vast and able to be traveled as an area and a plain for leaning ideas and beauty coincides with hyper-realism. Youth and old age are equivalent in the pictorial tract, as are the vegetable treasures of the decorum of human living.

This magmatic vertigo manifests in multi-shaded depths, that diaphragmatic labyrinth of aspirations and questions which in the rhythm of their birth, live or die, Bark shows to be terse, flawless.

The distance of detachment, which is evident in the images of this US photographer, is equivalent to the healthy distance from the misery of limit and from judgment, but also the distinctive tract of a conscience which completes itself in the Eden of the subconscious.

The aspect of “beyond” is a mitigation of the “here and now” which strikes one in the atmosphere of its representations: fleeting expressions of juxtaposition as an expression of the absurd which is a geophysical boundary seen as beyond where we are as plausible objective.

The garage is where in 20th Century America art developed to then enter the road to fame. With this photographic exhibition Bark places the mind in its garage and auscultates the lyrical process of the ideal. Everything takes on question or assertive form of the mental postures of he who bares himself without caption and lets himself be observed.

The works selected for the Roman exhibition follow no fashion or documentary nature, but claim fruition for themselves, as nature’s activity and how one can make natural without comprehension, but by a penetrating process and by assonance, becoming an act of faith towards the unknowable specter of things beyond the function.

By definition, paradise does not reside on Earth nor rules relating to it, but it is other of essence and absence of the known that leads to truth, the good and the beauty of art which is to error what the Sun is to the Earth in its revealing essence.

From Bark’s “Grand Tour” a neo-romantic island emerges which finds reason in irrationality and heeds the plea of those who know that there is a trajectory possible from doubt to the unknown.

An open form of the knowledge of not knowing as applying substance in poetry: measure and meter of the marvelous which is the free manifestation of the natural as heavenly “garage” in the work of existence