Hence, if at the beginning was the line, the talented designer always fascinated by the features of the human faces as if they were proper landscapes, in his mature years Piero Viti selects the camera as his means of expression, as if it concentrates all the necessary tools to the artist, allowing him at the same time an immediate thus endless exploration of the human.
Both in the use of colour and black and white photography, Piero Viti also reserves special attention to shadows and lights, which tell of its sources of greatest inspiration: Titian, Caravaggio and Flemish masters Van Dyck and Vermeer, confirming its deep concern in the pictorial composition and resulting fruition of the photographic image. Ultimately, his photographs leave little room for concessions and hedonistic speculations. The subjects and models of his portraits ignore the glamor of fashion clichés. Rather, as in a painting by Rembrandt, they are offered in their cracks and imperfections, therefore as if revealing the secret of the subject’s experience. Even when clothes and objects that populate the background are designed and chosen with extreme care, it’s just to get to the hundred twenty-fifth of a second, that moment when the factor of the unpredictable becomes crucial.
Piero Viti has inherited from his father Luciano, a well-known philatelist, not only the love for collecting, but also and above all the rigour and sense of detail, the meticulousness, the concentration of the gaze on things, the precise and in-depth observation of reality as well as of the image, where the eye loves to scrutinise, like a probe or a microscope, the innermost recesses of everything it encounters or discovers before it.
Piero Viti worked with Franco Giacometti at the Camuffo agency in Venice (1985-1989), then as an ad man in Brazil, invited by the DPZ agency (1989). Back in Venice, he founded the political and cultural news magazine Nexus with Giovanni di Stefano and Andrea Pagnes (1993). In 1998, after meeting Pier Luigi Cerri, he collaborated on the design of the inaugural exhibition at Palazzo Grassi dedicated to the Phoenicians, thus contributing to the major architectural renovation project entrusted to Gae Aulenti. He continued his experience in the field of graphics and design in Verona, where he worked on numerous image projects for the promotion of events in the city, before devoting himself exclusively to photography and drawing.