"Tnx by Riccardo Banfi is the result of a research started in 2012 focussing on TENAX, an historic Florentine club active since the early 80s, today one of the leading venues of Italy's house music scene. (...)
The EDM (Electronic Dance Music) universe is an interest that the artist has always experienced and lived with the enthusiasm of passion.
The outbursts generated by this sense of belonging charge the sequence of images with a dynamism that returns in the portraits, snap-shots of the event in which everyone – photographer included – takes part. The swift reflexes that Banfi uses to observe what is happening bind the series, and the club's space is animated by the fluid temporality of a night, whose duration is marked by the only gaze that catches its protagonists and stories. (…)
The sacred-profane dualism, that has always characterized this festive rituality, passes through the book and the images' variable intensities; depictions of clublife's anecdotes fade for brief instants into the ephemeral architecture of the place, referring to the 90s imagery of the warehouses that hosted the first illegal raves. Bundles of light cut the scenery, instilling a weightless aura in the outlines of those who officiate the function: the DJs, the podium dancer, the adepts; figures destined, eventually, to return to a more earthly connotation. (…)
Voracious observer and consumer of a musical culture of which he is part, Banfi still manages to establish the necessary distance to convey a vision, creating a text where also the sociological element prevails. In the clubbers' portraits, genuine purely aesthetical presences, and in the choice of black and white, arises that nature of permanence that wraps the club's ritual in a sort of periodic motion, destined to return, different in appearance but identical in essence, to a determined expression of a recreational, elusive, narcissistic craving. Some enigmatic stops, in which secondary details – such as a display dummy torso or the venue corridors – reveal a spirit of observation and of image construction that goes beyond instinctive recording, relaunching the serpentine pace guiding the photographer. (…)
Tnx is the Florentine episode, the arena of which the artist offers his peculiar vision. A scene emerges, in which, despite the passing of the years and the alteration of the form, that elementary idea resists. Vivi felice".
Excerpt from: Giulia Bini, IN FIRENZE L'ANNO MMXIII,Riccardo Banfi "Tnx", Yes I am Writing A Book, Milan, 2015