Sunlight Spaces


  • Photographer
    Alexander Martirosov
  • Prize
    Honorable Mention
  • Date of Photograph
    2012
  • Technical Info
    Large Format (4x5) photography

"I think that contemporary photography also needs to move away from the idea of Control. Now this idea is not associated with an ideology, but with something else. On the one hand it is a dictate of the concept, a certain revealed installation of consciousness, which guides photo media. On the other hand it is a fetish of objectivity going from the advertising as a resource for subconscious. So that is why a simple getting used to the scene (in fact – it is not as simple as we have lost the skills of space experience, but about it later) represents the need of certain lines of contemporary art to "wash vision" (a phrase of K. Petrov-Vodkin), to find a loophole in the continuous fence of conceptualized art discourse. The strategy of Martirosov is very simple in this series - it is completely expressible by the old definition: to take a look. We may say “yes” to strategy, but the realization possesses the potential of self-development. Wide aspect lens provides a horizontal spatial coverage, but the author also endeavors to highlight the solemn order of spatial plans by non-technical means. These are ways of natural, full-scale composite: a horizontal line correlated with the viewer’s position, a certain line traced foreground (an irrigation pipe laid on the ground), structuredness of the soil itself, bearing traces of the age-old process, cultivation. This natural structuredness and compositionality are important, among other things, as a factor of the release from the Control: they are not outside, intended, fabricated - they are observed, they are full-scale. There is another factor of this kind: the artist eliminates any hint of a direct linear perspective of pictorial sense. Just in the middle of several pictures a country road is given: it is going naturally "into the distance", turning in a subtle thread. But at the same time the reducing of the spatial plan is not organized, on the contrary, they seem to "swell", optically correcting these seemingly dimensional linear changes. Optics also lets avoiding effect of "edges’ wrapping" on the periphery of the space: it makes remembering the installation of Matyushin on "extended watching" Alexander Borovsky. Art historian, curator and the head of the Contemporary Art Department at the State Russian Museum, Honored Artist of the Russian Federation.

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