From the text by Costantino D’Orazio Works delivered from immortality

[In almost fifty years work, Claudio Abate has focused his lens on countless contemporary works of art, but perhaps never like with De Dominicis has he been able to grasp their sense and offer up a meaningful interpretation. His viewpoint, greatly foreshortened to record the objects and the context around them, or perpendicular and symmetrical, to put across the work’s coldness and calculation, entered the heart of the projects by the artist from Ancona. Perhaps this is why at the end of 1970’s driven by an iconoclastic fever, De Dominicis secretly got his hands on and destroyed more than one hundred and eighty of Abate’s negatives, thereby creating a void in the visual memory of this work, which from then on could only be filled by words and tales…

…And it is precisely the criticism of his gaze that gives Abate’s images their great worth. He accompanied De Dominicis’s work for over ten years. He was able to have a special, conspiratorial and complex relationship with him from his début in Rome to Fabio Sargentini’s Attico in 1969. These “rediscovered shots” look to us like archaeological remains, extraordinarily rare traces of works of art that often lasted a few days, or even just a few hours…]