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Unfocused reading
Andreas Gursky at the Catherine Foundation
Opened with the support of Beeline as part of the Moscow Photobiennale, the exhibition of the famous German photographer Andreas Gursky is one of the most significant events of the photo festival. His photographs delight in both the perfectionism of their execution and their inability to fit into everyday visual experience. Each photograph is like a giant painting. The subjects are somewhat too ordinary: physical education parades, offices in a skyscraper, mountains with a cable car, Formula 1 races. The more mysterious it is to look at them. Something prevents us from accepting the pictures as usual photo chronicles. Gradually you understand what exactly is getting in the way: the dispersed installation of space. There is no single perspective in the photographs. Thanks to the methods of the latest digital technologies developed by Gursky at the famous Dusseldorf Academy, panels with a landscape or floors of office towers are mounted from different spatial valve cells. And the gaze glides over the surface of the photo without penetrating deeper. He literally touches the surface of things, forms, objects. The eye is perplexed, at the same time in admiration for such excessive generosity towards him.Fundamental to Gursky's aesthetic is a 2006 photograph of a giant photograph of the interior of a Gothic chapel. Huge stained glass windows are shown as a pure frame. They did not burst into precious colors. They are lit evenly, like a black and white engraving. And the pictures in the windows are mounted in the same way as the world in Gursky’s own photographs: nothing develops in depth. All figures are on the proscenium. Everything is formed according to the principle of a frame with filling cells. By analogy with the cloisonné enamel jewelry technique.
Each viewer is free to independently determine the metaphysical value of such a montage of the universe. Some will see in it the traditions of the great catalogs of high scholasticism (Gothic again), others will bring it closer to the image of the pop art universe, to the catalog of things of a global supermarket.