Galleria Franco Noero gallery is pleased to announce the first exhibition of Jeff Burton's polaroids.

In the early 90’s, at the beginning of his professional career as a photographer, Burton fitted his Hasselblad 2 -1/4" with a polaroid back for lighting tests while shooting movie posters for the porn industry, video covers, and stills for printed publicity. Shot over a decade and originally made only for his private use, these photographies bear witness to a process of manufacturing desire, according to a time that now gets the flavour of something past and to an assigned job within which the artist had though the opportunity to define his own taste for vibrating colours, unexpected details and point of views.

A more sophisticated and constantly changing technology, made easily available by digital photography and internet streaming, has left those polaroids in the dust - of a shoebox in this case - not unlike family photos. Many aspects of Burton's practice have derived from inspecting the porn environments he became intimate with and by comparing porn's relation and proximity to Hollywood, two closely aligned productions in Los Angeles which paths cross in an unavoidable way, although not as properly distinguished as such. Burton's polaroids reflect on these interactions, and have a different relation to the artist, revealing a stronger intimacy given by their instant quality that does not allow for retouching, rethinking or editing.

Both film industries have influenced one another, and in Burton's case shooting movies with naked porn stars led to influence his later practice of portraying stars from movies wearing designer clothes. The polaroids mark the formative time of Burton's photography, in which the seeming differences between Porn and Hollywood become almost none at all.

Although Burton's trajectory has developed in high-productions in Los Angeles and Europe, these works convey Burton's personal involvement working in an industry which outpour was destined to a non-mainstream circulation, while they are strongly influenced by his living in Los Angeles and get him to portray the very controversial aspects of it, finding his photographic footing on the terrain of fantasy made real and real made into fantasy.

This exhibition is Jeff Burton’s fourth solo show with the gallery. Burton’s work has been featured in many exhibitions in international Institutions, and the latest ones include: “I want to see how you see”, at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany, April 2010; “Wall Rockets: Contemporary Artists and Ed Ruscha,” at the Flag Art Foundation and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; “Into Me/Out of Me,” at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, LIC, NY, which traveled to KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany and to MACRO (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea), Rome, Italy.