Soul Steps I.03 -- Luigi Fieni

photo-eye is happy to present a new body of work from Photographer's Showcase artist Luigi Fieni titled Soul Steps.

Like his other portfolio on the Showcase, The Room of 1000 Demons, Fieni's photographs take us to the Mustang region of Nepal. The remote former kingdom is located high in the Himalayas north of the Annapurna range and was closed to outsiders until 1991; to this day tourism is restricted to around 1000 per year. Today Mustang is often associated with its religious art, which is what brought Fieni to the region in the first place. A conservator with a special skill in reproducing a variety of painting techniques, Fieni has spent years working to restore and protect the rich cultural artifacts of the area in a program that simultaneously trains artists from the region in the art and science of conservation, giving them the tools to restore their heritage themselves.

Soul Steps I.04 -- Luigi Fieni

Fieni's conservation work has given him a unique perspective on this region. His photographs reveal his painterly mindset perhaps most directly in The Room of 1000 Demons series where the motion lines in his images create direct analogies to brush strokes, but Soul Steps is a series shot with a similar sensibility. It is a way of seeing a place through a deep knowledge of an area, an understanding of the culture and reverence for its beauty, but also with the gaze of an outsider.  

Soul Steps I.08 -- Luigi Fieni

Mustang is not an easy place to get to know, particularly for those of us outside the region. Fieni shares with us a view that very few get to see. These images of the mountains around Damodar Kunda, a place of spiritual pilgrimage for Buddhist and Hindus, show an impressively stunning landscape, though at times Fieni's images may seem abstract. Filling the frame completely, without the grounding sight of horizon or sky, the velvety amber-colored slopes and blue-grey shadowed valleys are difficult to perceive in scale. They seem at once impossibly massive, but curiously small, the stuff of dreams. It is no surprise that this unique landscape in the rain shadow of the Himalayas is a sacred place. Fieni, too, is a pilgrim. The inspiration he draws from the landscape is visible in his images, and he shares his experience in the poem that opens his statement. The first few lines read:

The journey my destination, the nature my sanctuary.

Kneeling to the shrine my invocation fades as the last word of a prayer lasted for the whole pilgrimage.

The body weakens as my soul gets stronger.

The sound of my steps echoes in my soul as the path crosses with my prayers...

Soul Steps I.12 -- Luigi Fieni

See Luigi Fieni's portfolios on the Photographer's Showcase

For more information on Luigi Fieni's photographs, please contact Anne Kelly at photo-eye Gallery by email or by calling the gallery at (505) 988-5152 x202

photo-eye is pleased to announce a portfolio from Luigi Fieni -- The Room of 1000 Demons:

The Student -- Luigi Fieni

For The Room of 1000 Demons, Luigi Fieni took his inspiration from an old Buddhist legend about transformation through the confrontation of one's deepest fears. He explains the tale like this:

“Every hundred years, Buddhist students could undergo a ceremony in order to attain enlightenment.

Those students had to pass a test consisting of walking through the room of a 1000 demons: an empty dark room guarded by 2 guardians.

Once inside, the 1000 demons would take the forms of the students’ worst fears, and the students would have to fight them in order to walk through the room. If they succeeded, they would attain enlightenment.”

As we look through the images, we walk through the tale; we meet the young-looking but confident warrior, the imposing guardians and a collection of strange and colorful demons, alive with movement. And in the end, the warrior breaks free and returns to the world enlightened. Shot in Nepal, Fieni first came to the region through his career as an art restorer. Since that initial trip he has frequently returned, working on the restoration of ancient art work in a variety of locales in Asia and teaching locals the craft of art restoration. With his background in painting, Fieni is specially skilled in reproducing a variety of styles and techniques with a paint brush, and that ability that makes him especially well suited to restoration, but that also comes through in his photographic images.

The Fears I -- Luigi Fieni

Fieni's mastery of these skills is evident in his photography. Photographing using a low shutter speed, Fieni rotates, zooms and pans his camera while shooting, capturing an image, but also streaks of color and light -- motion blurs that give the images an otherworldly feel. The effect is exceptionally painterly -- the strokes of light enhancing the tone and timbre of the images. They are almost impressionistic under the painterly definition, with their fine but visible strokes, and focus on light and movement. "As my background is mostly painting, my work is constantly trying to merge photography with painting, trying to produce photographs that are as pictorial as possible: my personal view of things," says Fieni. That personal view is certainly full of magical beauty.

See Luigi Fieni's portfolio The Room of 1000 Demons on the Photographer's Showcase here.

For more information, please contact photo-eye Gallery Associate Director Anne Kelly by email or by calling the gallery at (505) 988-5152 x202