Also known as Bacca, Benjamin Baccarani’s artistic journey began in San Francisco where he lived and studied commercial photography. Over the course of his training, he soon felt the need to break away from commercial projects and learned to paint and draw with fellow artists he met in the city.
His work revolves around the relationship between people and images and more precisely between photography and memory. He believes that images and photographs can act as “memory capsules”. However, since the democratization of the internet in the ’90s, media have largely contributed to the widespread of digital imagery. Technological breakthroughs such as camera-equipped smartphones lead to a culture of the “snapshot” that triggered an addiction to imagery worldwide. Nowadays, around 95 millions of images are posted each day on an average social media platform. The lifetime of each post is approximately of 21 hours before it disapears in an ever expanding digital graveyard.
Bacca’s process results in scavenging those visuals to give them a new chance to exist. His pluridisciplinary workflow aims to support the idea that the metaphysical essence of mankind is unseparable from the iconography of human society. Bacca will often use alternative photographic processes, mixed media and wood working techniques to intertwine photographs between layers of paint in a way that one medium will corrupt or blend with the other. Over the years his creative approach has become more subtle and results in an ever more seemless hybridation of mediums.