Fabio Paleari: I wont give up

Opening 7.30 to 10.30 p.m. Saturday 23 February

Fabio Paleari is one of the most radical artists on the Italian photography scene today. In this exhibition he presents a selection of the more representative shots taken from his latest publication I won't give up, a documentary book published by Damiani (Bologna).

Fabio Paleari's photographs represent a sort of intimate diary of intense experiences and highly charged emotions. He already explored this approach in his book The Leu Family's Family Iron, which tells the story the Leus, a family of Swiss tattoo artists. He did the same thing in La mia incapacità di stare al mondo (my inability to fit in this world), his astonishing debut (with Davide Manuli) on the international photography scene.

The star of his latest work is a part of London, the East End (E1), whose inhabitants, daily life and devastating white nights he has documented. These are micro stories, little and larger-than-life dramas, moments of happiness, portraits of normal people and celebrities. In the thick of all this, there's the brief and the have-you-read-the-latest love story between two genuine stars of London's East End: Kate Moss and Pete Doherty. He accompanies them discretely into their personal labyrinth of catastrophes, abandon and reconciliation, excesses and improvised tenderness.

As a true crooner, nihilist and melancholic, Fabio Paleari spent two years of his life hanging out with them backstage, down the pub, in luxury hotels and in greasy spoons tucked away down dark dingy alleys.

Captured here at the height of its urban and anthropological transformation, as it mutates from slum into model borough, the East End dominates everything and everyone. The change was so profound as to permeate people's expressions and postures, spreading like a sort of disease into the subtle and fleeting features of her residents.

The rich humus in the area has given rise to a host of apparently dissonant figures, all born into twinned, overlapping universes, who share the same strengths, hopes and drives: the pusher, the style journalist the runaway girl, the old prostitute and brothel wrapped into one, the publisher and the artist.

Fabio Paleari's storytelling skills are uncanny. He is able to draw on his wild past, at times taming it and filtering it with a more mature and meditative eye; at others he is also cynical and revelatory.

The Kate Moss he reveals to us is not the superficial one game for anything; neither is she the Kate Moss of the huge fashion houses and newspapers squabbling with each other to get her on their pages at any cost. Paradoxically, she isn't the rash and standoffish girl - all gaffs and front-page scandal - coming round after another overdose (real or concocted) that the newsmagazines have been feeding us. She is almost an everyday woman, almost in love, almost happy and almost despairing.

The magic in the work by Fabio Paleari lies right here in the fine balance between reportage and art, in this almost. This is what makes the photos by Fabio Paleari sensational: they are simply sensational and not sensationalist.

Besides the selection of work on Pate and Kate, the backbone of the book published by Damiani and presented for the first time in the gallery, we will also present some new unpublished portraits by Abel Ferrara, Rob Montgomery, Paul Fryer, Paul Ro and the Babyshambles.

Fabio Paleari (Milan, 1963) is acknowledged as being one of the most radical and personal photographers at a national level. He has exhibited in Italy and abroad in private galleries and institutions. Many books containing his work have been published, some of which (The Leu Family's Family Iron, Trolley Publishing, London, 2003; La mia incapacità di stare al mondo, Shooting Book, Roma, 1995-2007) have become best sellers in their own right. He has also produced documentaries and experimental films (The last beat of Allen Ginsberg, 2006; Sesso orale, 2003, Bella bionda, 2002). He is currently working on a new project with the American musician Devendra Banhart. Fabio Paleari is represented exclusively by Guido Costa Projects in Torino.

Fabio Paleari
I won't give up