FOTOFO
Galéria Profil,
Prepoštská 4,
Bratislava
The exhibition will be opened on September 6, 2000 at 5 p.m.
in Photograph Gallery Profil, Prepoštská 4,814 99 Bratislava
The exhibition will last until oktober 7, 2000
Opening hours: 1 p.m. – 6 p.m. except Mondays
Petr Weigl - PORTRIATS
The question that pops up when one views portrait photographs by the young Prague photographer Petr Weigl, is this: "What does the bashfulness of The Man with the Fish reside in?"
In the whole series of the staged black-and-white portraits the author starts off some peculiar sort of play between the object and its props. Acting in the photographs are sharply outlined people in confrontation with objects, plants or animals provided with a certain mystical, biblical or folk symbolism (chalice and bread, poppy-heads, ferns, fire-flies, snails, snakes, fishes, spiders...). The author sets the personage before its prop and waits what happens.
A visual attraction and meaningful charge, as also the activity or passivity of the photographed animals, help to create unambiguous or multifarious relationships between the requisite and the portrayed figure. The unexpected situations into which the participants in the play are drawn by the author provoke in them the most diverse types of reactions. Their phlegmatic surrendering to snails creeping on their naked bodies, the disquieting voluptuousness from the presence of a spider on the cheek, or the cool readiness to swallow a titbit of little snakes coiling on a fork. The author allows the components of the picture reciprocally to interact until a gradual exhaustion of all the possible variations sets in among them.
It would seem as if the model really manifested itself in an improbable pose which, after hours of excitement in the studio, became peculiarly natural. By the addition of the attribute, the portrayed object identified itself with a certain model - vaguely assumed and sensed by both sides. The resulting photograph thus oscillates between a fragile authenticity of the relationship just acquired and some sort of a fate-imposed appropriateness of the model and its requisite. Weigl did not create the portrait of a woman with sacrificial gifts, a woman with an opium porridge, a man with snails. They are portraits of apprehension, awe, gluttony and renunciation. A characteristic feature of Weigl's work is also a play with the ambiguous, exploiting the principle of substitution. Polished beads connected on a table by an invisible thread, turn after a certain time lapse, into freshly washed cherries and the crack on the photograph of a female face presently changes into a leggy spider.
Another domain of Weigl's production resides in creating surfaces - of plants, objects and animals - still-lifes in which the importance of compositional relationships with the framework of a picture predominates over that of semantic relationships. The grid of pairs of pale tiny fishes lying opposite one another on a dark frozen ground, regaling themselves with "cold little kisses", is reminiscent of a cardiogramme, or en entry in the Morse alphabet. By his photographs of stumps of arms enveloped in plastic, sticking out from the lower edge of the pictures like apple-stalks, or curves made by flies in flight reminiscent of manoeuvrings of aerial acrobats, Weigl offers us "cut-outs" of reality in concealed forms. He disrupts connections with the original environment, designedly blurs the scale and thereby the borderline between the micro- and macro-worlds. We are left puzzled and perplexed.
In a strict purity of black-and-white photographs and with the aid of an optical enlargement of the texture in the surface of the objects, the author succeeded to bring about a certaian image of "colourfulness" - a spectrum of tastes, scents and tactile impressions. The cold lustres of fishes, snakes and snail-shells, the glittering sweetness of black cherries, or the sheen of the skin moistened by sweat or scented unguent, offer a contrast to the roughness of a wooden plank in the foreground and the fuzzy dimness and graininess of the background. The resulting effect of Weigl's photograph resides in his ability not to add anything any further.
Lucia Lendelová
