Photography is often an attempt—perhaps the last one—to make sense of things, to piece them back together through a creative discipline. It represents the place where, at that precise moment, the chaos comes to a halt, after the onslaught of desire or the pain of loss.

It was Jacques Lacan who showed us the difference between reality and the real. In the ordinary flow of reality—whether beautiful or ugly—there is a repetition, a “reassuring” return of the identical, a presence of objects to which we entrust our belief in stability. The real, on the other hand, is what disrupts this picture, something that exceeds it and rouses us from the indolence of materiality.

Denis Piel’s recent photographic projects fall within this tradition; his art has always told stories through images that are never an end in themselves, but are conceived as threads of life, traces of possible existences.

Born in France in 1944, raised in Australia, and educated in the United States, Piel is an internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker whose works are part of the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Best known for his contributions to fashion photography in the 1980s, during which he collaborated with Condé Nast, he produced over a thousand photo shoots in a single decade for the American, German, Italian, French, and British editions of Vogue, as well as for *Vanity Fair*, *Self*, and *Gentlemen’s Quarterly*, capturing the evolution of fashion and society over time.

After the tragedy of the September 11 attacks, he decided to move permanently with his family to Lempaut, in southwestern France, where he lived and worked at the Château de Padiès—a Renaissance castle that had been undergoing restoration since 1992—and turned his attention to nature and working the land.

This is how the two photography projects, *Down to Earth* and *Padièscapes*, came to be. They were presented at Villa Pignatelli—Casa della Fotografia in Naples—marking their first exhibition in an Italian public museum, and were conceived as a true ode to life and the entire cycle of existence.

For Photo Shelter 2023, Maria Savarese has selected a collection of photographs from “Padièscapes,” in which the artist focuses on a specific element: water combined with images of flowers.

Using a Plexiglas cube filled with water as his tool and mixing colors almost as if in a child’s game, Piel manages to achieve a three-dimensional effect and, as he himself states, to rediscover “that innocence to which so many artists would like to return.”

The images appear as authentic pictograms—triumphant still lifes evoking ancient times—that seem to offer the artist the opportunity to bring to fruition a challenge between technology and a return to the craftsmanship of photography, through the subversion of space-time and the choice of an element—light—that allows one to journey from the smallest detail of a flower to a more distant and intangible dimension.

His photographic work shows us how, as we explore our surroundings, our attention lingers on certain objects, creating a landscape of emotional signs and aesthetic references destined to remain enveloped in a temporality that encompasses the past in the form of memory and the future in the form of anticipation.

A plant or a flower, just like a meadow, becomes an aesthetic constellation that traces—and inhabits—the map of our evocative objects.

Michel Foucault argued that “the smallest particle is at the same time the totality of the world.” As the quintessential heterotopia—a place where multiple imaginary spaces coexist—nature represents both a mythical and a real challenge to the space in which we live.

— Maria Savarese