Prof. Italo Zannier History of photography-University of Venice-Italy
Introduction about Pino Dal Gal (1977)

...The photographer’s enquiring eye can indifferently understand the dimensions of space and time: he makes their relationships static and then renewes them in a “continuous”. He points out their cultural links, through chiaroscuro and colour, which imprint themselves on fragile, two-dimentional coded rectangles, which are, in addition, “reproduceable and multiplycable”.

To read these images means to reopen, to extend the sorrounding of a piece of reality, explored in the cone of the lens, by the permanent gaze of the research into thruth, far off, unknown and improbable as it is.
From the illusory “global” vision which claims to show everyting, we have arrived at the figurative abstractions of the nearing elements of a Strand, at the obstinate identification of the “natural” form of a Weston, or at the metaphisical, totemic apparitions of a Caponigro where the detail is the protagonist of the images, explaning the misterious morphology of our existential covering, in which at times we are trapped.

Pino Dal Gal is following this path when he examines the “bald” rocks of Sardinia, fixing those structures which corrispond to a way of his of seeing and testifying to an active partecipation in the reality with wich one is confronted, as though

But this time the artist is a photographer who abstracts, recuperates, reinvents, indicates forms which flower in space, joining in the debate about the ambiguous relationship between art and nature, which was born long ago and is found again in the form of Dolmen, in the stone phantasms of Boccioni or Moore or Nivola....

The “Rocks” of Capo Testa, fined down by wind, sand, water and sun in the millenial geological formations of the Gallurica landscape, are analysed by Pino Dal Gal in long meditations, which inexorabily involve him in the natural element, and with mutable light and shade which the sensitive eye caresses in a continuous and perhaps unrepeatable blink.

The images creates miths and simbols, which emerge from anthropomorphic totems, found and torn from the coherent chaos of the landscape, by way of the elimination of the superflous, an inexhaustable cancellation of the dross, to discover the “significant” element of ancestral affair. A dramatic talk with nature, which is silent but which produces such signs when the granite seems to wait and fataly claim the caress of a long new gare.

Claws, beaks, animals wings, forgotten in a far off bestiary, helmeted warriors and women outstreched and screaming, all seem charmed by the wind which has genera ted this organic store of forms, and represented by Pino Dal as a sequence of characters with which, we long to involve ourselves in an irresistable, never ending embrace.