OBSERVING the time and space of things you reach the point where everything starts to become more discernible; you reach the border of the night recreating the acts of human tragedy – comedy in a an incisive and critical way, indefinably perceivable, by creating a parallel reality next to the existing one, and often, this other, adjacent reality reveals the limits of the fine emotional and mental folds of human potential more clearly. The “bridge” that stretches out to connect these parallel universes in the photographic vision of Ippokratis Tavlarios is the thoroughfare -“agusa”.
The photographic representations within the present album are “solid movements” which imply archetypes within an apocryphal atmosphere. By traveling between Kalymnos-Andalusia-Havana and passing through scores of other places in the world, he returns once more to Kalymnos-the starting point, the “birthplace”, seeking the “Sacred” by displaying transformations in people that are ordinary and yet alienated, full of paradoxes, unsuspecting and yet so familiar.
A subterranean music permeates all the breadth of “agusa” and the pictorial re/presentations act as a silent libretto that runs through all spiritual and existential human conditions. A music that begins as an adagio, gradually, through a prolonged agony into divine ecstasy until –near the end- it comes into a crescendo, the methexis that leads to purgation.
The work of Ippokratis Tavlarios is suffused with a kind of poetic serenity, a dead calm that reveals itself more and more intensely – becoming more and more noticeable to the viewer, due to the emotional vortex of anguish raging around it. The latent mood in many of the photographical representations is a kind of “dark” feast – an unabashedly mythical eroticism is inherent throughout the album, whether it springs from the girls with the enigmatic smiles in Barcelona, or from the tolstoyan “Holy Fool” in Iaşi with the profound –nearly frightening- gaze, that seems like he is invoking some sacred void.
The photographic world of Tavlarios is a world of “initiation” as well as invocation before an iconostasis of spiritual concentration that sometimes manifests itself in the beguiling gaze of a “modern” saint in Rhodes, sometimes as a robed figure –in Ioannina- in the light of a candle that pulses in the darkness, or as a girl reading while lying on a bed in Saragossa. The viewer is free to enter into a game of associations – invited to take part in the “ceremony”, on the condition that he truly sees, that he himself is able to envisage, by pushing the associations to the farthest limit, the one that invites you to surrender to the random. The one that starts into an intuitive innocence, resulting/ending within innocence, after having been through a declivitous vertigo, through shivers of libation, isolation, domination finally, on the body of fate itself. One picture, one body, functions as a point on another body, whereas the entire body functions as a point for totality – for the revelation of the soul and spirit to their actual dimension: that of their permanently haunted state.
Within the present album, the artist renders the visage of emotion as if it stands resignedly idle while its sounds, colours and pulse palpitate, constantly shifting, perpetually altering – releasing the emotional forces through the pores of the photographic paper in every way, constantly repeating this stillness and motion of the dramatic man –either realistically or symbolically aiming to reach into the unknown – the beyond.
“Agusa”, through the realistic “impression” of the artist, presents to us this dramatic, this critical man, or alternatively, man in crisis. And through this, through the personal/private lives of those prosaic people, the photographer succeeds in faithfully representing man’s exit unto the world; he achieves one of the great requirements that art poses: for the individual to become the universal. And he does so in an exquisite manner.
Giorgos Alisanoglou
Thessaloniki, 2012
μετάφραση: Γιώργος Μαρτινίδης
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