Cool Hunting

By Jonah Samson

Is it possible to love dioramas too much? I don’t think so. I particularly love the macabre dioramas of Paolo Ventura.

His first body of work, called "War Souvenir," is a series of scenes set in his native Italy during WW II. The images are often gruesome in their detail—murders, hangings, dead soldiers face down in the mud—while others have an almost casual romance about them. “When I started to think about WW II in northern Italy, I felt like I almost knew everything. Maybe because of my fantasy, my grandmother telling me stories, maybe I was creating the scene around the story, so it was something familiar for me.”

His most recent work, "Winter Stories," is the story of a man thinking back on his life just before he dies. Each story represents a small piece of the man's life.