Stas Polnarev. Moscow. Eyesights
Curator: Anastasia Dokuchaeva
House of Moscow, Sofia
November 10-14, 2009
Among the
many attempts to capture the spirit of a city, the most subjective ones are usually
the most successful ones. Stas Polnarev's series Moscow. Eyesights was not intended as a systematic panorama of urban views.
It came about as a natural and almost inevitable consequence of the impossibility
of separating the photographer's view from that of his camera, as an everyday parallel
to Moscow life and Moscow
travels. Apart from the artist's individual perception of the city, the worldly
features and artistic properties of the resulting photographs reflect his
ability to see, when looking at Moscow, only this and only in this way. The end
result is not so much a portrait of a specific place, some urban landscapes and
characters populating them, but a portrait of Moscow
sensations and an attitude to the city – not as a megapolis, but
as a witness, an accomplice, an opponent, a friend.
An unsteady
light reducing all forms to quivering ripples, lending themselved to nearly tactile
feeling, outlines a geography of reminiscences and encounters. The fuzziness of
the picture makes the perception even more accurate, forcing the viewer to
feel, beyond this slipping away of sharp forms, some particularly intent gaze of
the artist that gradually washes away the outward shells in order to get to the
inner essence of things. This ceaseless visual quest, this visual "fumbling"
for an image within a photograph inadvertently puts the viewer into a position
of a person with bad eyesight, moving gingerly and slowly, whose intuition and sharpened
feelings let him discover more than the keenest gaze would, discovering a path
to hidden dimensions of the being, to a more nuanced perception of reality. The
viewer is always required to make the next mental step, he is carefully
provoked to some continuous movement of his view and emotions and forced to
feel and evaluate in real terms the difference between the notions of
"look" and "see".
Stas Polnarev. From the series "Moscow. Eyesights"
The emotional
integrity of the series, the visual affinity of spaces appearing on all the photographs
and the slowed flow of time in all the works create a feeling of nearly classical
integrity of time, place and action, reproducing from fragments something inseparable
and prime. And yet, escaping all the time and passing to the next frame, the
spirit of the city never lets us grasp it with any finality or define its
properties with any eventual precision. Rather than any events of the past finished
once and for all or etherial, unfeasible fantasies of the author, the pictures record
the captured “potentiality” that might have once taken place or probably is
taking place right in front of our eyes – all at the same time. So, this
journey is, rather, a journey in a probable city, whose existence is poised at
the borderline of reality, where every phenomenon is unpredictable and inimitable.
The reality
of life captured by the photographic lens and going on independently of it, competes
with the reality of the resulting work of art, challenging, in its turn, the reality
of the fragments of photographic film that sometimes enter our field of vision.
But it is the technical "imperfection" – a glitch of the camera or mind
– that makes the vaguely discernible object of the image surprisingly and convincingly
reliable, honest and unretouched.
Anastasia Dokuchaeva
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