Orange & Blue

“Staring at the Sun and the Sea. The scenery is magical and I feel relieved. The light and the colors nurture my eyes, and the images remain in my mind. Infinite combinations of Orange and Blue, compressed in a memory where reality merges with fantasy.“

“Orange&Blue” is an ongoing study on “Sun & Sea” which brings together materialization of memory and physicality of photography with an aim to re-imagine “what does it mean to be human in the time when our experience of the world is mediated through technology”.

“Orange” is the first part of the study in which I recall a very familiar yet sublime experience of Sunrise and Sunset, a scenery both visually and emotionally profound, and use the means of Light, Form and Color to capture the essence of it.

By taking the iconic imagery of sunrises and sunsets which our memory is loaded with as a reference, I’m using the darkness of the photo studio as a place to recreate the full range of sunlight colors which we experience throughout the day. Orange and blue light serves as a tool to come as close as possible to the feeling one have when being in the sun and soaking its warmth and color. Throughout the process of re-imagining the iconic imagery, figuration reaches abstraction and all that’s left in the image are light, form and color, ultimately the constitutive elements of any photograph.

With my work I hope to evoke familiar experiences by designing the site-specific installations in which light, colors, materials and motifs from the photographic work expand into the space and create a living image.

The installation form of this project is an environment in which immaterial substances of light and color gain their physical properties and evoke a familiar experience of being in the sun. Attached is the documentation of the first presentation “An Environment for Self-Reflection” from Nest, The Hague (April 2019), and the second one which was an environment “Oasis” designed as the graduation presentation at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague (July, 2019).

The presentation of the work is never repeated, but always approached in a different way and adapted to a specific location. Currently I am working on a new exhibition design and would like to continue further. The underlying idea is to keep on bringing the sunlight into exhibition spaces and evoke feeling of pleasure and warmth. While I continue to develop further the first part of the study, “Sun”, I’ve started working on the second part which is devoted to the “Sea” and its first chapter “How to See the Sea”.

“Orange&Blue” is a long term project which aims to enrich the discourse on physicality of photography and proposes an approach towards exhibition-making which evokes both visual and physical experience of photography. The project would eventually be concluded in a book that would contain relevant research material, my own photo-sculptural work as well as the writing.