Fauna #3, 2014

Zoltan Gerliczki  

Fauna #3, by Zoltan Gerliczki From the series "Fauna" Archival Pigment Print Image size: 48 in H x 39 in W. Edition of 8 + 2AP Unframed 2014 

This artwork seamlessly blends portraiture with botanical elements, featuring a figure adorned in vibrant florals. A captivating fusion of human and nature, the piece uses vivid daisies and gerberas to construct both the background and the person, creating an ethereal and dreamlike effect. The subject's calm gaze and floral crown evoke a sense of serenity and connection to nature, while the overlapping petals suggest a harmony between the organic world and human identity. The bold, rich colors, ranging from deep reds to soft pinks and whites, bring intensity and depth to the composition. This masterpiece invites the viewer to reflect on the intricate relationship between humanity and the natural environment, making it both visually stunning and thought-provoking. Its innovative approach and detailed execution position it as a unique piece in contemporary art.

“I am presenting women as powerful as any man. Each woman decorated with the most common and beautiful flowers. Each picture is powerful in color, energetic, and pure in nature, their expression is innocent.” Your images point toward qualities of women that go largely unseen, yet you seek to reveal through beauty and wonder. The colors and shapes perfectly illustrate the idea of “beauty and wonder” in a way that only nature could produce. Your painterly photos are portraits that use the feminine body as a canvas, showing the viewer each subject’s personality, expressiveness and mystery. The sense of fluid movement creates aesthetic tensions between the contrasting lights and darks in the photos, placing the viewer in a dream-like world of compositions where surreal figures are juxtaposed against painterly frames - layered on top of one another in a way that compresses space and altars the context and sense of scale. The compositions become like another world where sensuous body figures merge with the environment and transform to become new compositional structures. These imaginary worlds remove the viewer from their commonly understood vantage points because it’s impossible to know where the photographer’s eye is in relationship to the subjects. Using this technique you take the viewer into more surreal, magical worlds. By compositionally emphasizing light and color through selective focus, you create compositions that promote feelings of delicacy and gracefulness. You put the viewer in a position to speculate what and where it is they are seeing. Because of this, the images evoke ideas around vantage points, perception, and imagination. There is a sense of silence, softness, and a fluid movement into alternate realities within these photographs and the use of color as a transformational, alchemical tool to transmute what you see into what you would like others to see adds a layer of depth to the work that is appreciated by viewers from all walks of life.