29 ARTS IN PROGRESS gallery of Milan, pays tribute to one of the most acclaimed masters of contemporary photography, Gian Paolo Barbieri and, in particular, to the “tropical” series of his long-term career that led him, since the eighties, to exotic and distant places, in the attempt to collect unprecedented portraits of a pure humanity and nature, temporal fragments bound to vanish for ever, passing frames of an overwhelming metamorphosis and fatal ruin.

The exhibition “In viaggio”, from June 7th to July 14th,  gathers a selection of 30 photographs by Gian Paolo Barbieri, including vintage gelatin silver prints and polaroids, taken since the eighties, during his journeys to tropical paradises such as Tahiti, Madagascar, Seychelles and Polinesia.

Barbieri finds himself, perhaps for the first time, utterly alone behind the camera, confronted with a subject who neither need nor conceive any alteration or setting.

What is left is the quality of attention and the candour of a gaze capable of penetrating the inner nature of a subject.

Among contemporary photographers, Barbieri is certainly one of the few who resorted to creativity with more prowess and bravery, unconcerned, yet pleased to remove the boundaries between true and false, artificial and actual space. At this stage images lead the game as well as reality. In distant worlds, hovering above the ridge of beauty.