Ugo Locatelli (Brussels 1940 – Piacenza 2023) had been exploring the subtle space since 1962.

Ugo Locatelli, an architect and experimental artist, is deeply interested in observing the world beyond appearances, the generative intertwining of knowledge, hypertextuality, the potential of signs and metaphors, and relational thinking. His exploration through photography began in 1962, focusing on the possibility of removing elements of the ‘real’ from superficial gazes.
Some of his projects have been realized with contributions from other authors, such as Ben Vautier of the Fluxus Group for the International Non-Art Festival in 1969, and Sebastiano Vassalli for Teatro Uno. Il Mazzo. Il gioco del teatro del Mondo, presented at the Venice Biennale in 1972. Noteworthy are two theses: one on his photographic research from 1962-1972 (Lezoli 2003, Parma), and the other on his subsequent work (Licata 2006, Catania).
In 1997, he initiated the “Areale” project, a multidisciplinary discovery-based learning lab that focuses on observing the intricacies of reality, aimed at fostering an ecology of vision and thought. Information about “Areale” projects from 1997 to 2017 can be found at http://www.ugolocatelli.it.

Photofestival 2017
Notes for the exhibition project AREALITA’
Quintocortile Gallery – Milan – May 2017
With this series of site-specific photographic panels called Arealità, six like the principal directions in space, Quintocortile Gallery—a place for the gaze—becomes the watched place, both visible and invisible. Each panel includes a photograph of a detail of the environment, a sequence of decomposition into six flow-images, and then a final crystal-image, seemingly abstract. In this exploration, each panel transforms into a ‘sensitive station,’ a pre-text open to all the gazes it encounters.
The deconstruction is kaleidoscopic, a way of observing the image in its becoming, of questioning it: thus, the subject-observer, in trying to understand the object or its image, works on their own perception, influencing and being influenced.
Mentally, each frame is both three-dimensional (in its ‘solid’ configuration as a crystal-image) and four-dimensional (as a flow-image along which time flows, with visible vibrations).
Arealità is an old word that indicates the nature and property of an area. By chance, the word also suggests a lack of reality or, rather, a tenuous, light, suspended reality (Jean-Luc Nancy, Corpus, Cronopio, Naples 1995). For the author here, the term areale is understood in a triple sense: the “real” as an area of relation; with the privative “a,” the absence of the “real”; with the “a” of motion toward the place, an approach to the “real.” Areale is a discovery-based learning process initiated in 1997 with numerous multidisciplinary projects .
This concept of the image can be found in Gilles Deleuze’s analysis in L’image-temps, Les éditions de Minuit, Paris 1985. In this sense, one could say that the cinematic nature of our knowledge of things stems from the kaleidoscopic nature of our adaptation to them (Henri Bergson, L’Evolution créatrice, Editeur Félix Alcan, Paris 1907).