It all depends on the light,
that great magician who, in a second,
can transform the trivial into the extraordinary.
Boris Savelev, Secret City, 1988
Greetings to the Art Talk community. This is my first presentation in this beautiful community dedicated to art, I hope this publication is to your liking.
Thanks for the welcome.
PhotoESPAÑA is one of the most important photography festivals held every year around the world. This year's official program (2024) includes an exhibition by photographer Boris Savelev entitled "Viewfinder-Una forma de mirar".
The exhibition venue, "La Serrería Belga", is located in the heart of Madrid (Spain), near the Atocha Station and the Prado Museum. Today, "La Serrería" is an industrial space converted into an excellent cultural venue.
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This exhibition is the most extensive retrospective of Boris Savelev to date, covering his entire career as a photographer from his beginnings in the seventies, with his Iskra 6x6 cameras and his Leica and his black and white photographs, to digital photography, through the Kodachrome and the Orwochrom.
Savelev, who was born in 1947 in Chernivtsi, Ukraine, affirms that it was in 1976 when he really became a photographer, when he joined the Foto Club Novator, a group of photographers outside the Official Union of Photographers and distanced from the official Soviet photography.
I went to this exhibition accompanied by my friend @soho1958 and, certainly, it was very fortunate. Boris Savelev's work generated many questions for me about his creation, especially the large work. In such a way that @soho1958 was clearing my doubts about the color, shadows, light, texture and grain of many of the works exhibited.
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It seems that the type of film used in many of them, Kodachrome and Orwochrom, is part of the secret of the color. The size of the camera aperture, wide, and the time the photographs were taken, at sunrise or sunset, are other ingredients that explain the aesthetics of many of the photographs on display.
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Those doubts that my friend was not able to resolve were resolved by the exhibition catalog. The final result of many of Savelev's creations, so close to an oil painting in texture and relief, is due to a pigment transfer process that involves the superimposition of gelatin and pigment, in layers, on a gesso background and a final wax finish.
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Savelev´s viewfinder and our gaze
I was surprised that photography could also have a tempo. The fact Savelev´s photography a has a rhythm, the exhibition is slow, each work is a call to stop and reflect. When we look out of those windows created by Savelev, we see reality without the veil of self-complacency of a fabricated public opinion. On the other side is reality, at least one reality, that of degraded urban landscapes. No matter the place, whether Moscow, St. Petersburg, New York, London or Madrid, the scenery is populated by spectres, shadows or solitary reflections.
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Sharing a visit to an exhibition also allows us to share our own associations, because each vision has a personal context, a biography.
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My companion and I agreed on the similarity of the dirty aesthetic to Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972) and Gilbert Taylor's photography.
@soho1958 also showed his photographer's eye by associating the red color stamped on Savelev's canvases with the work of Fred Herzog.
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My gaze, fuller of melancholy in the Hippocratic sense, from exile observed together with a child trapped in an instant, a fine thread that linked the reality behind each window with the solitary landscapes of Van Gogh. Another world in which the specters also walk alone and in silence.
In my mind reverberated, among ants and scorpions, Autumn Landscape (1885), The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in the Snow (1885), Flower Beds in Holland (1883) ...
.... And then there are those faces... the passage of time... from that young girl with a cheerful face, perhaps showing the hope of the Perestroika years, to the later faces... sculpted by the weight of centuries....
That's all, thank you very much for reading this far. You can continue with (this distant reflection of) the exhibition.
Thanks for reading.
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BORIS SAVELEV
Viewfinder, una forma de mirar
27 May -14 July 2024 PHotoESPAÑA
Serrerría Belga, Madrid
Adam Lowe
Commissioner of the exhibition
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All photos are my property and taken with my Xiaomi 14 cell phone. Edited with GIMP.
Banner edited with Canva pro and cropped with ezgif.com
Avatar created with AI Ideogram
Prompt
silueta de aviador hecha con cordones blancos, poster, 3d render, conceptual art
Translated into English from my native language Spanish with
DeepL