Piantadosi’s photographs allow you to recognise and appreciate the sights that nature offers up to us every day even though we are often too distracted or ill-prepared to realise it. The photographer unveils and reveals this elusive beauty through his curiosity, inspiration, creativity and technique.

Piantadosi has explored ice in all its forms, studying its genesis and physical nature, stripping it back to its essence in his images and removing them from their context to make them seem abstract and sometimes almost metaphysical. The images resulting from the creative process are no longer moored to visible reality but freighted with new meanings that conjure up the forms of our own interior life and imagination.

Ice comes in innumerable shapes: thin slaps marked by regular or chaotic patterns, thick, compact slabs with linear, curvilinear and mosaic fractures, solitary or clustered bubbles and more. The structures assumed by ice on still water surfaces are determined by the simultaneous, combined action of different physical effects that bring about water’s transformation  from liquid to solid: air and water temperature, the motion of currents flowing beneath the layer of ice, rising air bubbles and a host of other variables.

The shapes formed by the ice perfectly embody the forces at play as water changes from a liquid to a solid state and bear witness to these transformations.

Because these shapes are the outcome of watery forces of expansion and contraction, crystallising, unifying and swirling, they often reflect the real or imagined forces we expect of a universe in a state of flux.

As the title of the exhibition suggests, the forms are fragile: momentary, fleeting and often disappearing after a few hours or even minutes. In the time it takes for his camera shutter to open and close, Piantadosi captures their intrinsic aesthetic qualities and transforms them into abstract forms that fuel our imaginations.