GENOA.- Bruno Cattani's photographic journey travels through the places that make up our memory, places that we harbor within ourselves, roads, houses, rooms, cities, sometimes common objects, lived according to each individual life path. A path through which we record emotions that enrich and nourish our soul by attributing to these places our own single story. These places, in fact, possess a soul.

Cattani's journey through images, contains narrative and evocaive elements that go beyond the mere documentation, they bring to life the excitement and magic that belong to our personal and collective experiences.

The magic continues with Carousel; a carousel's ability to change, like dreams, not only the passage of time - the minutes marking the rhythm of a sweet melody that recalls a happy childhood, an innocence vanished years ago - but also the ability to create unreal, out of time worlds, arising from the relationship between them and the location where they are placed.

With a precise aesthetic decision, Cattani - who has traveled far and wide across the world seeking Carousel rides and photographing them often without figures present – over exposes the surrounding enviroment and accentuates their colours thus placing his carousels out of context thus emphasizing their dream like quality, like space ships that have just landed in a magic world where time and space do not exist, a place where at least for the length of the ride one can stop time and take a journey into the golden days of childhood where, and here I am paraphrasing Freud, children at play could build their own world, or rather, give to their liking a new arrangement of the things of their world.

Piergiuseppina Fagandini, Psychologist and Psychotherapist writes: While playing, children symbolically represent fantasies, fears, desires, experiences, and in doing so they use the same language and the same form of that archaic expression that is phylogenetically acquired and well known in dreams. A child's play can be assimilated to the adult's dream. The conscious and unconscious fantasies of the child and his/her mental representations, find in the game their mise-en-scene, just like the dream is the mise-en-scene of the adult unconscious fantasy.

Let us then follow compliently Bruno Cattani in a a corousel ride and, as in a waking dream, change reality into an unreal space outside of time transforming this space into pure fantasy, giving life for a few minutes to a magic spell.

Bruno Cattani lives and works in Reggio Emilia Over the years he received numerous commissions as part of the photographic research for museums such as the Musée Rodin, the Musée du Louvre, the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris; the National Institute for Graphics, the Pergamon Museum in Berlin and the Archaeological Superintendence of Pompeii. In 2000 he is present in the exhibition D'après l'Antique at the Musée du Louvre and in the same year, his exhibition Th Art of Sites is inserted in the program of the Mois de la Photo in Paris. Figures In Time is the title of the solo show held in 2002 at the Galleria Civica di Modena curated by Walter Guadagnini. In 2003 some of his photographs commissioned by the Musée Rodin in Paris, are on show at the exhibition curated by Sandro Parmiggiani Camille Claudel. Anatomy of the inner life held at Palazzo Magnani in Reggio Emilia. He is among the artists invited to exhibit in 2011 at the Italian Pavilion of the 54th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, selected by Italo Zannier.

His photographs are kept at the Archives photographiques du Musée du Louvre, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the National Archaeological Museum of Naples, the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in Paris, the Musee Reattu Arles, the Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi, the Musée Nicephore Niépce Ville de Chalon sur Saône, the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie in Paris, the Polaroid Collection and the Museum of Thessaloniki (Greece).