Enquiries on the sublime collects works from three projects that have been undertaken since the year 2013. They are part of three series dedicated by Fernando Maselli (Buenos Aires, 1978) to a photographical enquiry on the aesthetical status of the sublime. The works comprised are not constituted by shots taken directly from reality but, instead, they offer landscapes that were either recreated through a complex photographic staging or that were built as models. Employing both technical and formal techniques, Maselli points at the appeal of the unassailable, the cravings that humans hold for the unknown strongholds of nature. These works embrace the fantasy of an original virginity facing the calamity that is suffered by those who believe that everything is already corrupted.
Between 2011 and 2013, Maselli undertook a photographic series that captured natural settings untouched by human hands in wooded areas, mountain ranges or in prominent Spanish heights. Those settings shared a common background, since they were once considered sacred by different cultural practices. This inquiry into the religious memory brought into the foreground a recognition of the mysterious, which Maselli –without dogmatism of any kind– used as a communion between man and nature similar to that embraced by the Romantics. Despite its differences with subsequent works, the series Hierophanies can be considered as the aesthetic origin that defines the series Artificial Infinity, Annunciation and Dioramas: a landscape photography that confronts the author with an overwhelming aesthetic category: the sublime. His objective is to captivate the spectator in a moral and sentimental reflection on nature.