Increasingly, large capitals create solitaires.
Countless factors contribute to this. Displaced from their natural origins into metropolis, people seek knowledge through study or a different life, often at enormous sacrifice.
Moving from mostly small towns to big cities, they are faced with numerous problems- solitude, namely.
This project springs from my own personal battle against a phase of extreme loneliness, in London. I revisited my digital albums archive. Stories and memories contained therein (which I though erased) were resurrected. Those photos aided remembrance, more or less truthful, assuming the shape of personal dialogues.
I naturally and spontaneously began to select, print and cut small excerpts and fragments of those images and their stories.
The next step was to directly intervene in the created images. Time-dissolved images turned opaque; past narratives, previously mystery-shrouded, soon became present.
By (re)shooting these images, new objects emerged, new subjects, new narratives, which built a new discourse around them. These have led me to ideas of transformation and aging, to something associated with time.
Whilst analysing questions of time, transformation, aging, Oscar Wilde’s (Dublin 1854, Paris 1900) “Portrait of Dorian Gray” sprung to mind.
Basil Hallward, artist painter, friend of Dorian Gray, enchanted by the young man’s beauty, decided to portray it full-length.
Seeing the painting, Dorian realized that his beauty would disappear with the passage of time, and thus manifested a desire (which is granted) to exchange his soul for eternal youth. His portrait would decay in his place.
Dorian, pursues a dissolute life of debauchery, including crime by murdering his friend Basil. His youth and seduction persist, unaffected by age- its marks manifest only in a decaying picture.
In Wilde’s work, it is the portrait that undergoes transformation, not Dorian. His external appearance is preserved, whilst his interior is irreversibly corroded.
Conversely, this photographic series depicts exterior transformation reflected in the dissolved images, whilst their concealed appeal remains unaltered by the time’s passing.
The photos are multi-layered. When peeled back, they allow the observer to be suspended in a certain time, through contemplation. This breaks the spell, and decodes the hidden poetic form of his images, which remain unchanged.
In this photographic series, the artist dissolves images, fragments of time, a time of memories. As if those were mirrors. Mirrors reflecting life’s true reality and loneliness.