FOTOFO
Galéria Profil,
Prepoštská 4,
Bratislava
The exhibition will be opened on June 7, 2000 at 5 p.m.
in Photograph Gallery Profil, Prepoštská 4,814 99 Bratislava
The exhibition will last until Jully 4, 2000
Opening hours: 1 p.m. – 6 p.m. except Mondays
Stephanos Paschos
It is in the nature of photography depiction to maintain an indissoluble bond with the object or the face represented. The photograph itself may turn yellow or fade, but nothing can suppress the consciousness of the „subject“ photographed as it emerges from the image whenever a viewer looks at it on the photographic paper.
In that sense, the subject photographed is not so much a
matter of the form of the face depicted – for example – as it is of a special
consciousness of time, one which is cennected with the act of photography per se and more
specifically with
a time at which the photograph is taken. It is the „then“ which we perceive in the
„now“ in which we are looking at a photograph
The conciousness of the subject photographed has nthing whatever to do with the refinement of the photographic depiction – that is, with is clarity, its faithful reproduction of the details of tone or colour. It resists the transformation of photographic matter, stage – mangement interventions and predetermined poses and emerges, intact, from the unique representational characteristics of photography as a genre.
In Stephanos Paschos´ Meta – plasis II, III, IV, this supremacy of the consciousness of the subject photographed is the most profound essence of the work. The young people´s bodies are transferred successively from the camera film on to materials such as Polaroid film, cloth, plaster or wood.
Inherent in the choice of materials and in the methods by which the photographic material is transferred from one surface to another is the concept of fragility. In some cases, the Polaroid emulsion has been superimposed on the open weave of the gauze cloth, causing the body to seem to be hovering in a translucent white vacuum. In other cases, it is placed on a thin layer of plaster, which then breaks and creates tiny cracks across the surface of the photograph, scoring the bodies of young people, while in yet a third group the texture of the wood give rise to almost imperceptible wrinkles. The poses of the models, the fictitious decay which the images have undergone, their placing, as in a theatre set, on damaged pieces of wood or the trunks of trees, all tend to shift the consiousness of the subject photographed into different periods in the history of images. The large dimensions of some works and the imprinting of others on the trunks of trees call for answers rather as historical finds do. However, one of the features common to all these works is that they depict young people; furthermore, they remind us of ritual imges whose purpose is to preserve the appearance of the body at the height of its powers.
These triumphant symbols of life, setting themselves up in oppositions to the decay of the body, are themselves photographic images which resist the natural decay of their materials. The body photographed is capable of crossing time, religions and traditions, of making myths, of provoking conjectures, of looking in its prime and forever contemporary to the eye that falls upon it.
Costis Antoniadis
curator-critic, Head of
Photographic Department
of Technological Educational Institution/ Athens
In these superb, disturbing and fragmented icons of the body, we search and glimpse our origin, in our transience, our end. We agonise over the image of our morality from womb to death and recreate incessantly revive.
In the depiction of the body, the physical and spiritual journey is one and the same. The deeper quest is the revelation of that which animates the flesh, the dark rays of light that pierce the surface of our being.
Stephanos Paschos´s triptychs Meta-Plasis II (Re-Creation), enact a metaphysical vision. Excerpts from St. John´s Apocalypse are added to the images in a eulogy of submission to forces and meanings beyond our comprehension. For Paschos, it is the opening of the seventh seal.
Youthful and vibrant bodies in convoluted poses anact rituals as captives in an oneiric half-light. In this vision of submissive ectasy, pain and joy, despire and hope, degradation and nobility are all but one. The altar of sensuality becom´s a mixed blessing that brings, along with the outward scars of time, inner wounds that yeam for redemption.
Paschos sees these inner wounds with the blind eyes of a seer. He bandages and heals, at times
John Demos
