Description
Garden is first and foremost a carefully published album in BLOW UP PRESS (a Polish boutique publishing house). Marta Zgierska is a visual artist whose art deals with issues of trauma, border experiences and working with the body, as we read in her bio. Her body is the object of performative actions, which we can also now notice in the Garden. Mateusz Sarełło, on the other hand, began his adventure with photography with photojournalism, before turning to first-person narration. The pair met in a project Garden. She met or parted just now, maybe parted, or maybe approached.... Garden is a publication consisting of a couple of parts and a couple of types of paper with letterpress elements stitched together with pastel thread. The first part is black and white collages of dried flowers with body elements (Matthew took photos of the dried flowers, and Marta added body elements to the plants); complementing this series are crystal vases printed with silver ink on black cardboard. Between these parts is an imprinted text to her/about her written by him(?). The whole thing ends with a text by François Cheval on green paper. And from the combination of all these elements comes out a tragicomedy of bodies between relationships. Anyway, see for yourself. Aleksandra Sliwczynska-Kupidura
The body in search of its own reconstruction - reflections invited Marta Zgierska i Mateusz Sarełło. Despite the withdrawal of the face, despite the anonymity, the distraction resulting from the dismemberment does not tell us that it has disappeared. In contrast, the numerous details arranged in bouquets place this unique experience as the beginning of a new horizon.
In this strange Garden The fantastic, surreal component makes this short and dense photographic story a tragicomedy of the body. Photography, and this is one of its rare qualities, has the ability to model the body, transforming it into a Dionysian event. The agitation of the real world is countered by the medium with symbolic, grotesque violence, exploring new and surprising forms. Do Marta Zgierska and Mateusz Sarello hope that a happy ending can emerge from this monstrous collage, that a bright future can be rebuilt? And how can the details of the body, experienced in everyday life as experienced in pleasure, be transformed into a foundational event, over the ruins of past morbidity?
Although they do not want to create a passionate body, the ambition of our two artists is for their practice to become the boundary between the animate and the immaterial. The desire to reconstruct the animate is not an idle quest - a will to control what we cannot dominate - it is a search for a different definition of perception, a determination for a different understanding: an attempt to unite contradictory terms, plant and human, which all reach toward the rebirth of the soul. In this way, a series of images are persistently created, the logic of which cannot be escaped.
The premise of this beginning is this body that breaks, that dissipates and that disappears. Garden turns to the attributes of segmentation and confronts them, distancing them from reality. Focusing on the details rather than the whole, a powerful bond is built between these mismatched forms through these hallucinatory traces. Against the monochromatic background of amniotic fluid, the details of these divided bodies express the will of the two descendants of Isis. More than fourteen parts are spread out on all sides! In a frantic pursuit of a different perception, Marta Zgierska and Matthew Sarello assemble identical parts, which they duplicate over and over again.
The body undergoes a remarkable mutation. In turn, it is cut, altered to fold into stalks and fuse together, thus creating a fantastic anatomy, half-body, half-object, a kind of chimera that is both organic and plant-like. The remains of the dismembered body are arranged in a form that is usually related to still life! This at first glance explains the full meaning of the phrase. These strange fruits, emerging from the tip of the stem, vibrant and powerful, whose energy and palpitation can be felt, cause surprise, if not fear.
From the fragmentation operation comes a new organization, the initial stages of reconstruction. The bits, or remnants, at will, are combined into sprays, where, shown in the photograph, they no longer result from common sense. On the contrary, these organs, ears, eyes, hands, mouth, are no longer limited to their only function, hearing, sight, touch, kiss, etc. Against reason, the union of matter forces us to recognize the authority of another necessity, whose eyes, ears, eyes, hands, mouth flourish under the influence of a monstrous device. In ominous-looking compositions, the extravagant parts of the headless body enhance it all: henceforth we hear everything, see everything, feel everything, embrace everything!
The photomontage, between alchemy and semblance, outlines a vibrant and active cosmos with positive principles and without reference, which weaves a web of unexpected relationships from an archipelago of fragments according to constantly renewing transformations. Technique reveals the disappearance of the camera, as well as the sacred nature of camera work, in favor of photography beyond.
However, there is - an insult to Cartesianism - the probability of these "absurd" reconciliations in the application of this biology of opposites. Metamorphoses are subject to other laws that ultimately mix everything in between. The possibilities of photography and the photographic experiments carried out since the 1920s make what at first glance seems outrageous perfectly legitimate. The paradox of the image is that it offers a monstrous accumulation, a proposal of infinite possibilities that cannot be summed up in a simple sum of bulbs, petals, but which, like Artemis of Ephesus, reactivates and reformulates the image of the mother goddess. Here, fertility is not maternal in any way. It is purely poetic, bodily and cognitive.
The beginning of a new era, the first image is her whole crowd, the new Eve, who through the omnipresence of the plural creates its own parts before being born again!
If we return from the underworld abundant with a new élan vital - a new life force - perhaps we will become creators and henceforth be able to structure the sensations of the new order. Building our own path, building a unique unity, requires pulling the weeds from the past. Post-traumatic reconstruction can only begin with the rejection of past times.
François Chevale
Translated from French Matilde Holloway