Pia Riverola took this picture at Mazzarò Bay, near Taormina in Sicily in 2022. It is included in a book of her photographs, Días, which is something like the perfect Instagram holiday album, a series of sunlight-drenched, colour-saturated details from different personal paradises across the world.
Riverola is not the first artist to be beguiled by this particular beach. Its visitors have included Oscar Wilde and Hemingway, Goethe and Tennessee Williams. It was not for nothing that DH Lawrence set his story Sun in Taormina; its whole drama is a kind of homage to the restorative powers of heat and light. In the first line a young woman under English skies is prescribed a vitamin D cure: “‘Take her away, into the sun,’ the doctors said”; a few paragraphs later, in Taormina, the unnamed patient is transported to the ultimate seaside reverie: “She could feel the sun penetrating even into her bones; nay, further, even into her emotions and her thoughts. The dark tensions of her emotion began to give way, the cold dark clots of her thoughts began to dissolve. She was beginning to feel warm right through. Turning over, she let her shoulders dissolve in the sun… And she lay half stunned with wonder at the thing that was happening to her.”
You sense a comparable kind of stunned wonder in some of Barcelona-born Piarola’s pictures: her camera dwells on cocktail glasses and impossible tropical flowers, on dishevelled hotel bedrooms and the dance of colours on water at dawn and dusk. She is based between Mexico and Los Angeles, and is often on assignment for fashion magazines; she keeps her cameras with her before and after shoots, waiting for unchoreographed moments of beauty or surprise. Sometimes, as here, the world appears to set all the required elements in place – the rock, the swimmer, the curves of the parasol – and offers the viewer an irresistible caption: wish you were here.
