ABOUT / CONTACT

Dave Tavanti (Perugia, 1974) is a visual artist working with infrared photography.

Years of portrait photography and a background in cinematography and color grading shaped the way Clorofilla approaches its subjects. These are not landscapes — they are presences.

Each tree is treated with the same attention given to a face: its structure, its weight, what it holds and what it conceals.

The Clorofilla project received 2nd place in the Fine Art / Other category at the IPA – International Photography Awards 2025, a competition of nearly 14,000 entries from 100 countries, and an Honorable Mention at the Tokyo International Foto Awards (TIFA) 2025. Nominated for the reFocus Awards World Photo Annual 2025 (Fine Art).

The work has been published in the print edition of Tutti Fotografi (July/August 2025, pp. 28–33), Italy’s historic photography magazine.

Exhibition presence includes The Glasgow Gallery of Photography (2026), Villa Contemporanea Monza, and DAK’ART OFF Milano.

CONTACT
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/clorofilla.art
Mail: info@clorofilla.art

“Dave Tavanti succumbs to the overpowering influence of cinema,
his frames distorted by the unseen
and enchanted in their pursuit,
driven by the desire to narrate and capture it,
to transcend the limits of his senses,
with the childlike joy
of infusing mystery into a simple and familiar place.

But Predator is lost in the woods,
moving slowly, almost timidly, as if afraid to crush the leaves.
It forgets to hunt
and is spellbound by the mysterious patterns of trees,
the gentle rustles, the lace-like branches.
Messages of peace and joy reach it,
the simple joy of existence
in the eternal cycle of life,
the law of necessity
that can be both beautiful and whimsical,
obvious and incomprehensible.

Images flow before our eyes,
of us turned into extraterrestrials
witnessing things never seen in our familiar forest,
traversed so many times, walking distractedly.
Its light now astonishes us and tells stories without words,
crafted only of emotions.

And the solitary tree, so perfect and symmetrical,
becomes a symbol of beauty,
layfully entering our minds,
their structure hungry for rationality,
with the smile that Leonardo
painted on the face of the Mona Lisa,
encapsulating the same mystery.”

Rita Castigli

The sound compositions accompanying Clorofilla installations are built from recordings of the same trees that appear in the images. Wood samples are captured, reduced to minimal wave fragments, and used as raw material for synthesis, so that the music carries something of the same subject across a different register of perception. Everything in Clorofilla, image, print, sound, is conceived and made by the same hand.