Cristiano Volk is an Italian photographer ( Trieste 1987 ) who lives and works in a small town called Staranzano, in the northeast of Italy. After a short period of study at Spazio Labo’ in Bologna, he worked with artists such as Massimo Mastrorillo and Federico Clavarino.
In addition to that, he attended several workshops with Antonio Xoubanova, Ricardo Cases, Anouk Kruithof, Jason Fulford, Max Pinckers, Milo Montelli, Fosi Vegue, Michele Tagliaferri, Martin Kollar and Aleix Plademunt.
About ‘Sinking Stone’:
Sinking Stone by Cristiano Volk shines a mirror on Venice; the theatre, history, tourism and excesses of a tragic city; beautiful but flawed and decaying. Drawing on traditions of baroque theatre, sculpture, architecture and painting, Cristiano’s photographs shine a harsh light on the contrasting surfaces and residents of the city. Sinking Stone is a modern-day Vanitas, showing both sides of Venice – a town immortalised through its history and tourism and a precarious, unstable island sinking into water.
The constant invasion of tourists creates a sort of living theater, full of moments and opportunities. Volk concentrates on the body language, gestures and poses of these flocks, desperate to photograph, pose and record with grotesque regularity, without penetrating the surface of the city. Cristiano’s colour work also relates to the Venetian pictorial technique of “tonalismo”, which meant depth was achieved by means of the use of colour. In Sinking Stone , the use of flash and of a limited colour palette points to a different end: illusionistic space is constantly challenged by overexposed areas and awkward angles.
Cristiano’s Venice appears like a Gorgon mask, a vulgar, almost overwhelming face which behind reveals little. After all, vanus, the Latin root word for the city, means empty.
