Today we are meeting another artist that started to experiment with our inaugural NFT portal: Camilla Simoncini.
Camilla Simoncini is a photographer, designer, digital art director and opera reviewer based in Milan. Her shots investigate the truth of things/world/feelings with the power of monochromatic views: synthesis, contrasts, materiality, an imaginary space left to each, so that everyone can re-read reality with their own sensitivity. In 2020 she also directed her first short film, "SENZA FINE (The Weekend)".
Her work is multifaced and her background brought her near different experiences that shaped her imaginary and creative realm creating a wide range of projects, including the Decadent Renaissance describing the fast-paced and fast-consuming society that we are living today.
Walk us through your academic experience. How do you think your education shaped your career?
I studied Product Design at Politecnico di Milano, an education surely more related to my Design/Art Directory activity than to the merely artistic one. During this journey, I felt that I had the chance to fully combine the main pillars of my persona: the creative and the practical ones. It certainly provided me with the basis to work on my Digital artwork, but above all it allowed me to develop the attention for equilibrium and essentiality, the cleanliness of the shape, the research of meaning behind every compositive and designing choice.
What is indispensable while working in your studio?
Chet Baker and a prosecco glass!
Who are your favorite artists and who are the ones that built your creative imaginary?
For what concerns photography, I can’t help but mention Alan Schaller and Elliot Erwitt, two figures who are very distant from each other but are very close to my taste and my way of conceiving photography, beyond the black and white which I mainly use in my production. I admire the contrasts’ essentiality, the cleanliness of the shapes, the refinement of the spaces which frame the human figure in Schaller shots. On the other hand, I love the irony, the sceneries which remind of real and dreamlike environments at the same time, the playful use of perspective, the ability to capture the extraordinary in the ordinary of Erwitt.
In general, I find that looking around with curiosity and perseverance is extremely important. Drawing from every period and form of creative expression as much as one can, and then re-elaborate in our way, even (and probably above all) from the biggest artists of the past: the night that shapes the light and the light that shapes the night in Caravaggio’s paintings; the perfectionism together with the spontaneity that emerges from Mozart’s compositions; the rigor of the shape and the research for details in Mies Van Der Rohe projects; the raw power of Alda Merini’s verses; the psychological research, the impact, the universal ability to synthesize of the cinema of Truffaut, Godard, Bergman, Wenders, Scorsese. Inspiration is everywhere.
Inspiration is everywhere
How did COVID-19 impact your way of making art?
It surely didn’t help my thirst for research in Street Photography but... confined in the walls of my home, I began to explore this new tendency of “looking at our lives” from the window, the attempt to join other people looking out and crossing glances from one side of the road to the other. This led to the birth of some shootings and of the central scene of my first short film – “SENZA FINE (The Weekend)” – finished in 2020, during the first lockdown. There we are, framed in the Milanese night, each with its life and its routine. Distant but united in experiencing together this new unprecedented and difficult normal, physically far but close in feeling the moment.
What is your relationship with social media and how do you use them?
Everyone knows that on social media there is a lot of junk and that they can be a waste of time, and we still (ab)use them daily. But I believe that social media also are a great occasion to share beauty and to create a useful network that can provide us with a good dose of inspiration every day. I mainly refer to Instagram – the media I use the most – which puts images at its core. In this way, it can become a sort of mood board in continuous updating, if we accurately choose whom to follow for the quality of the proposed contents and if we put attention in posting our works and contents for the others. As Cartier-Bresson teaches us: "the mean can have every limit of the case, the important thing is to create and transfer something meaningful".
