Pietro Mattioli1977 (SIGNED)

In 1977 Pietro Mattioli took portraits in Zurich’s first Punk and New Wave nightclub. Their reduced and austere aesthetics followed a simple formula: the sitters were photographed with a flashlight in front of a neutral background, a fast and immediate look that was as outrageously sensationalist as it was coolly narcissistic. Mattioli created portraits that still look as fresh as if they were taken last night. They are combined with views of modernist housing tracts. Their juxtaposition atmospherically hints at the epochal shifts that took place in the late 1970s, proving that style sometimes indeed does presage the future. The portraits are inside views from the incubator of what would later be hailed as “postmodernism.” They are part of the immediate pre-history of the moment celebrated by this once inflationary term that in the meantime has as mysteriously and silently disappeared.