Chromotherapia

Lemon yellow, electric blue, bright red, and sunny orange: color as therapy. That's the vitamin-rich program of the new exhibition at the French Academy in Rome – Villa Medici, CHROMOTHERAPIA: The Feel-Good Color Photography.

The show, presented from February 28 to June 9, 2025 and curated by Maurizio Cattelan and Sam Stourdzé, invites us to explore the history of color photography over the whole course of the twentieth century, through the zestful gaze of 20 artists. The tour, in seven chapters, leads us into vibrant, saturated worlds where colour strikes the retina and engages the mind.

Often disparaged and rarely taken seriously, color photography has nevertheless allowed photographers to let their hair down, take out their palettes, and repaint the world. Many have freed themselves from the documentary function of the photographic medium to explore the common roots of the image and the imaginary, flirting with pop art, surrealism, bling, kitsch, and the baroque.

The conquest of color in photography closely followed the invention of the medium, with the first scientific experiments taking place in the mid-19th century. In 1907, the first industrial color photographic emerged with the autochrome, created by the Lumière brothers. This ushered in a century of chromatic experimentation: from ordinary scenes to philosophical and political reflections, color transcended the status of a mere tool and became a central narrative element.

All these innovations in everyday practice reveal a surreal, hyperreal image that reinvents genres — from still life to the portrait — providing a joyful, colorful image of the world. Among the artists in the exhibition, William Wegman (Holyoke, MA, 1943) tenderly immortalizes his dogs, transforming his four-legged companions into artistic icons, Juno Calypso (London, 1989) subverts the visual conventions of film and advertising to question injunctions on femininity, while police photographer Arnold Odermatt (Oberdorf, 1925–Stans, CH, 2021) documents road accidents in meticulous compositions where poetry replaces drama. Walter Chandoha (1920, Bayonne – 2019, Annandale, USA), nicknamed "The Cat Photographer," captures a human-like quality in the cats he photographs against saturated backgrounds, turning these pets into photographic icons. Ouka Leele (1957–2022, Madrid), for her part, uses vibrant tones to capture the liberation of bodies in a context of the cultural and societal revolution of the Movida , and Martin Parr (Epsom, UK, 1952), a great observer of our contemporary paradoxes, points his lens at baskets of fries, ironically suggesting the indigestion of the modern world. In the 2010s, Toiletpaper, the magazine co-founded by Maurizio Cattelan (Padua, 1960) and Pierpaolo Ferrari (Milan, 1971), both heir and precursor, a worthy and utterly transgressive descendant of these artists, interacts with and parasitizes this flamboyant, colorful little story.

Whether magnifying the details of an everyday scene, redefining codes of beauty in magazines, or capturing committed subjects, color photography offers an intensely chromatic vision of the world. This diversity of gazes and practices bears witness to a common thread: the desire to make us see things differently, by infusing images with the life and emotion that only color can convey.