Entering into contact with an ambience, until yesterday unknown, trying to represent its essence is not an easy act.

The skill and confidence with the technical medium can help, but that may not be sufficient. In this case, the result could be a set of evocative images, but something could still be lacking.

So here it is that the creative act takes the upper hand over technique by subjecting it to suit your needs. The mirror, has always been the subject of philosophical and psychoanalytic deepening, as an instrument. The specular expression formed from a reality and from its opposite, with their coexistence in the same context, in the same image, represents the manifestation of a creative act that does not stop at the surface of things, but tries to live them.

Two opposites which mate with one another, that look at each other and which together generates a new “whole”, different than the pure sum of the subject and of its opposite. It is not a technical artifice.

It is a new reality. A reality in which are united two sides of the same coin. It’s like a two-faced Janus in search of his own identity.

Windows and trees. Nature and creation of man. Negative and positive. Duality and non duality. Because, after the fusion, one cannot exist without the other.
Because the whole does not provide for separation between the two parts of a single subject. Because it’s easy to miss the reference and it becomes difficult to separate the old from the new, good from evil, the just from the unjust.

As well as life, photography in reality is never in black and white. It is in endless shades of grey.

New forms come to life and manifest themselves in these artworks of Shibu Arakkal. Forms that even for those who live in direct contact with could be hard to recognize.

Make an effort to see with different eyes than what one has on hand constitutes a mature approach that certainly generates a step forward in the knowledge of themselves and of what surrounds us.

Shibu Arakkal in interpreting, in the broadest and correct sense, his artistic residence in Belforte del Chienti as a unique opportunity has given body and feeling to everything with which he entered into contact. The result of this work is an intense and creative route of which this exposure, rich in suggestions and reflections, is only the first manifestation.

Alfonso Caputo

Belforte del Chienti, May | 2012

Shibu ArakkalDuality – Foreword