Patrick Bock

Patrick Bock sees with the eye of the sculptor, the painter, the architect and the philosopher. For the Marine Series, the artist uses a 4x5 inch chamber to create images that express the essence of his subjects. He places extraordinary value on the craftsmanship of shooting and printing photography with attention to tonal nuances and the potential of solids. In a style that skillfully synthesizes the Asian aesthetic - impossible not to think of Sugimoto's Seascapes, minimalist art and American conceptual art, the artistic environment in which the artist grew up, the photographs of Patrick Bock are of an essential simplicity that borders on freedom. The photographer captures the sea keeping only its essential elements: air and water. The two elements can be summed up by opposing or mingling into an indistinguishable whole. Only time and light participate in natural transformations. The water and the sky share the space of the image. Sometimes just an evanescent straight line separates them, other times that line is marked. The artist removes all distractions from photography and reduces the image to pure form and nuances of color and light. Devoid of narration, his photographs become concepts; spaces of freedom in which to link events and moments; mental images whose materialization is made possible through strict control of the photographic medium and the manual process of printing personally followed by the artist. Patrick Bock uses the technique of long exposure which allows to blend the parts of a moving image and to exalt the light in the night or dark scenes. The resulting images are elegant and refined. The artist works with color slide film and advanced 210mm lenses or his own creation. The slides are then developed and scanned before being printed with pigment inks on Hahnemühle fine art cotton paper. The result is like a pastel. Patrick Bock frees photography from the obligation of reality by bringing it closer to painting and at the same time engages us in a reflection on time, the ephemeral and memory. It is difficult to understand the immense, we interpret it by filling it with ourselves.