Fauna #5, 2014

Zoltan Gerliczki  

From the series "Fauna" Edition of 9 + 2AP .

“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.

This artwork masterfully intertwines human form with vibrant flora, creating a mesmerizing visual synthesis. The central figure, a nude woman, is almost camouflaged by the bold, colorful array of flowers enveloping her. Each petal and bloom is meticulously detailed, seamlessly blending into her skin, which becomes a living canvas. Her expression is serene and introspective, drawing viewers into a contemplative state. The juxtaposition of soft skin tones with the intense hues of red, purple, and yellow flowers adds a dynamic contrast. This piece challenges traditional boundaries of portraiture, exploring themes of nature, identity, and metamorphosis. The artist's skillful use of color and composition invites viewers to reflect on the unity between humanity and nature, making it a compelling and thought-provoking work.