About:

Giorgio Di Maio was born in 1963, Naples, where he graduated in Architecture, a discipline he practiced until the age of fifty, before dedicating himself full-time to photography. While starting out as an architect, he was engaged in several socially themed photographic projects within the Napolitan city context, including the following work, From Artists Colonies’ (1992); Let’s Bring a Flower (1996); via Fragments (1992); Shadows (1993) In the End...Love(1995), He has effectively enhanced his conception of photography through his understanding of architectural design which is founded on a deep knowledge of the semantic value of signs and their intrinsic narrative qualities typical of the organic architectures of F.L. Wright and the Neoplasticism of Theovan Doesburg and Piet Mondrian. He takes his photographic cues then, to open up multidisciplinary debates on many ethical and philosophical issues, among which, include reflections on patronage, gender relations in Argentinian tango, the sentimental and theological character of love, as well as the psychology of photography. These projects have also developed performative dimensions, so that his photography has been exhibited not only in academic exhibitions, but also in tandem with dancers and singers as well as exhibiting in marginalized communities, such as mental health asylums. n later years, he dedicated himself to studying American photographers, including André Kertész, Alfred Stieglitz, Minor White, who were chosen as reference points because of the narrative quality in their work. Between 2007 and 2010, a few years into his first photographic explorations, he started a new phase of photographic research through a series of landscapes taken in the Italian region of Basilicata, which reawakened his environmentalist convictions that had been developing through his Wrightian influenced sensibility. In his profession as an architect, he had always given attention to the development of his own artistic sensibility and was driven by the need to play a more creative role socially, and as a result he decided to devote himself entirely to photography in 2013, convinced of the communicative power of this medium. Influences in the work of Giorgio Di Maio Firstly, influenced by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus, he proposes the transmigration of the mystical and philosophical roots as experienced in the abstract art of Paul Klee and Vassilij Kandinskijto to photography, and whose concepts were expressed through two preliminary studies, ‘Water Trails’ and ‘Chiaroscuro’ (2013-2014). These projects became an exercise in extrapolating balanced fragments of lines and shapes in physical reality through the photographic image. Starting from the use of the figurative signs of abstract artists, he searches for compositions in the anthropic environment where diverse elements come together to form a balance. The project ‘Hidden Harmony’ was created as a series of images that would also represents a social attitude: following Alfred Stieglitz's equivalence principle, which allows for the opportunity of sharing a captured state of stillness with the belief that the experience of contemplation can be relived by the observer. Giorgio di Maio is currently undertaking new thematic photographic projects utilizing the same methodology as ‘Hidden Harmony’, these include Feminine (2016) and Cristianesimo Arte e Paganesimo (2017). Feminine(2016), a series of fragments from commercial advertising paintings in a collection in Milan, as a tribute to the form of the woman, the fertilizing muse of art. Cristianesimo Arte e Paganesimo deals with the theme of man's relationship with the spiritual, through photographs taken in the churches in the ancient center of Naples. Leopardi's sea (2020), on the other hand, allows Giorgio di Maio to approach the poets’ philosophy on the relationship between man, nature and the infinite and finds its main body of work in the locations frequented by Giacomo Leopardi between Porto Recanati and Numana in the Italian region of Marche. The lastest and most recent work ‘La Cura’ (2022), is a project dedicated to ‘decking’, i.e. to the temporary structures of construction sites, that in this current period of Italian tax breaks has temporarily transformed the profiles of Italian cities. In this series, Giorgio di Maio transfigures the care of buildings into a therapeutic value of balance expressed through the photographic image. These works have been exhibited and published in Italy and abroad. In Milan, a city that played a decisive role in the creation of ‘Hidden Harmony’, Giorgio di Maios’ work was presented at the Milano Photo Festival 2018 and at the MIA Photo Fair 2021. French, American and Spanish magazines such as L'Oeil de la Photographie, All about Photo, and Dodho, have disclosed their acknowledgement of ‘Hidden Harmony’. From 2021, he began collaborating with contract designers and his photographs are often used to furnish luxury hotels. He was chosen as a finalist in the Amedeo Modigliani Foundation prize (2022). Giorgio di Maio's artistic journey continues to take shape in the manner of a ‘work in progress’. At the origin of every photographic shot, balance, always arises from the diversity of lines, shapes and colors, mimicking the diversity of beings and objects called upon to form a whole. The search for photographic balance becomes evermore a philosophical journey on the path to peace.