Christian Duvernois Gallery will open with its inaugural show, a solo exhibition by contemporary Slovakian artist Lucia Papčo, entitled Arcadia. The 12 photographs and 6-minute video featured in the show, taken in the forested mountains of Papčo’s native Slovakia, capture the sublime, yet fleeting moments when light, angle and shadow align to reveal a more perfect vision of the landscape.
In many cases, the light conditions she sought to capture occur only a few days of the year, for a few minutes per day. The ephemeral nature of these “Arcadian moments” required the artist to spend a significant amount of time observing and documenting the changes in light and how they affected her perception of place.
Deirdre Donohue from the International Center of Photography writes that “viewing the images by Lucia Papčo gathered in this exhibition, the eye re-adjusts, perceptions change, and the invisible gradually reveals itself. The viewer is more than merely a witness, and instead participates in traversing the border between the visible and the invisible.”
Papčo limits herself to traditional black and white photography and, in order to imbue the images with a certain level of realism, avoids digital manipulation. By underexposing the photographs and transforming a colored reality into a monochromatic image, Papčo evokes a sense of abstraction from the physical environment. It may seem to the viewer as if the images were conceived from something that is disappearing, or has yet to be discovered.
Papčo, born in 1987 in Bratislava, is represented in the Essl Museum Collection in Austria and in prominent private collections in Slovakia, Portugal, Germany and the USA. Her work explores the intersection between photography and other graphic techniques as well as the distortion of plot and space.
Check out this interview excerpt with Lucia Papčo By Daniel Grúň
Landscape is a major theme of yours. It’s a contemplative landscape where civilisation has not made drastic inroads; landscape as a dramatic scene, apparently in expectation of something. Linked with this, you put extreme sensitivity in your works, you sharpen contrast, you work with a cumulation of tension. While manipulating the reference frame of the landscape space, you let the light that illuminates it go to the limit of visibility. At the same time you retain respect for materiality; in your photographs you describe and you emphasise the surface of living things. What does the truth of photographic realism mean for you? What kind of truth are you seeking?
The truth of photographic realism interests me precisely because a reference to reality is present. That presence imposes a limitation, and for me this raises the value of the image. Necessarily it includes the presence of the author in a given place at a given time, and all that had occurred previously – the search for the place and the lighting conditions with a large format camera. Also, as I see it, the limit set by reality, with its geographic-lighting potentialities and my own opportunities to translocate myself in space with the equipment that I need, creates an important part of the work. It’s a kind of “struggle” with reality and, let’s say, with truth, and so it becomes my partner and my enemy at one and the same time. This process therefore has a further inner dimension: the quest for potential in this world, and the quest for one’s own place in its midst. In those instances where it’s necessary to go deeper into the forests or valleys, when I feel alone in a potentially dangerous environment, and where socio-political reality retreats into the background to the point of utter irrelevance, the process gains in importance. The image carries all these elements sealed inside, it’s not just pressing a trigger at the opportune moment.
Taking the whole of your work over the past two years (2011-2012), it seems that you aren’t concerned with the contemporary social contexts which influence the character of the landscape, whether in our own context or worldwide. I am thinking mainly about how the landscape is changing under the influence of global capitalism and how civilisation is vandalising the monumentality of nature. But you, on the contrary, seek something timeless in it, you concentrate on the subjective experience of the landscape… On the other hand, there is something apocalyptic in your landscapes… What do you think of this ”reading“?
The landscape has life all on its own, independently of us. It has its own system, its principles whereby it responds to the interventions made upon it, and so on. On the other hand, Slovakia’s forests are not virgin: they are controlled, artifically planted and cleared. In many of my photographs I work precisely with these interventions as artistic elements. But I’m not engaged in imparting information, how insensitive they are and so on. I take them as some sort of intervention which I do not judge, but I’m assimilating it and using it for my own purposes. Yes, I am seeking more the timeless values contained in a brief moment and in the reality of this world. My aim is that the images may to that extent be projected into the viewer’s world and conversely, that he or she should be able to assimilate their experience. To be truthful, I’ve never had an apocalyptic feeling from my works, but of course the feeling of space losing itself in darkness, as if it were vanishing, may evoke that feeling. For me though, this empty, unreconstructible space is rather a potential for creation, something that is lost so that it may be filled by the subjective projection of the viewer. As in painting, in geometrical abstraction. Space becomes something unexplored, and thus one is challenged to step into it and examine it. And beyond the horizon there’s a suggestion of further space, which is thereby also present in the image.
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What:
Christian Duvernois Gallery Inaugural Opening – Lucia PAPČO
When:
February 26, 2014 from 6 to 8pm
Regular opening hours:
Monday – Friday, 11am – 6pm
Saturday, By Appointment Only
Where:
648 Broadway, #804 (Between Bleecker & Bond Streets)
Admission:
Free and open to the public
Information:
ChristianDuvernois.com | 212.268.3628
Transportation:
Subway – 6 (Bleecker St.), BDFM (Broadway-Lafayette), NR (Prince St.) Bus – M5