Hideaway-places, getaway-places
The flower that is being preserved in plaster, forms a creation bursting with poetry and eternity.¹
Charlotte Ballesteros
But is it not the case that when one loses one’s way one gains a wider view of the world? […] I invite you to discover La Ribaute without preconceptions.²
Anselm Kiefer
And just like the plaster that preserves the flower’s integrity – by definition transient -, photography preserves spaces and temporality which might be lost. By defying the transient nature of things, photography captures without promising though the possibility of reversion or restoration of the photographic object, but also without constituting itself in any kind of its forms (negative, paper or digital file) a sincere promise of eternal conservation. This feeling of something being frozen in time that photography causes has itself a limited amount of lifetime and only proves that the essential ability of photography as a means is not documenting but interpreting; the choice of what deserves to be in the frame and the fabrication of a new reality from scratch.
In the photo series by Charlotte Ballesteros which is been presented in the exhibition:
A Place to Wash Your Heart her desire to perceive via the photographic medium spaces that form landscapes and microcosms on their own is depicted: the Brion Tomb designed by Italian architect Carlo Scarpa in San Vito d’Altivole, Italy, and the studio compound of German artist Anselm Kiefer, known as La Ribaute, in Barjac, in the south of France. Both landscapes seem completely different from each other; the first being a sanctuary designed under Zen principles which functions as a hideaway, whilst the latter being about an artistic laboratory, a gateway, a space for experimentation, permanent trial and error, chaos. However, both of them act like shelters, that reflect, apart from their own aesthetic, perceptions about life, creativity and death and give space for contemplation and reflection, such as the shape structure of vesica piscis – which symbolizes the union between spiritual and physical – prominent in the Brion Tomb that operates as a window to the outside world.
The aforementioned two significant male figures; Scarpa for his particular attention to detail and the integration of Japanese architecture elements in his works, and Kiefer for his installations which incorporate his personal experience from the divided Germany, are being approached with sensitivity via the photographic lenses of Charlotte Ballesteros who follows the directions that the space itself dictates. Concerning the Brion Tomb, the camera rarely turns to the whole space, but mainly uncovers details; an inscription with the name of the architect, geometrical symmetries, the flowing water, a hidden door which reflects the serene atmosphere of meditation that the space depicts. Regarding Kiefer, Charlotte Ballesteros captures the disrupted dimension of the space, the abundance of materials, the ranches and cables that are being dragged, by choosing frames which exhibit subsets of the space appearing to be big but in reality representing details if someone takes into account the forty hectares into which this former silk factory is being expanded. In parallel and beyond the space, Charlotte Ballesteros converses with, and perhaps comes into contradiction with the two artists themselves who are in a sense present in each place; Scarpa is buried in the cemetery; who died prematurely after an accident, like Giuseppe Brion who in his memory the Brion Tomb was builded, and Kiefer who has left his mark for a duration of fifteen years when he was using La Ribaute both as an art studio and as a residence – eliminating the distance between life and work.
The coincidences are too many for anyone to defy: the concrete which prevails in both spaces, the Japanese details of the hideaway and the Japanese sunflowers that stand up to seven meters in the art studio and Kiefer uses in his works, their underground life – as well as the art studio that has many underground spaces and has been characterised by Kiefer as a mine. Despite their superficial differentiation – the cemetery as a place of silence, death and symmetry and the art studio as a place of creation, life and chaos – these two places are alike. In both of them decompositions occur; in the cemetery it is about a perpetual natural process and in the art studio a part of a creative one, an experiment that transmutes in the works of Kiefer and only whenever he chooses, they stop. And just like the preservation of the flower in the plaster has something poetic and eternal, as Charlotte Ballesteros mentions in her notes, (due to its natural decay resistance, I would like to add) in the same manner the preservation of these spaces through photography, which look a lot more resilient when compared to a flower, include surprisingly some sort of movement, of relocation.
From the point of view of Charlotte Ballesteros, these spaces have softened up and have been captured almost like portraits, focusing on the unexpected thus attributing to them their feminine side.
Eva Vaslamatzi
Trans. Elena Christodoulou
CHARLOTTE BALLESTEROS_A PLACE TO WASH YOUR HEART
opening: Thursday the 6th of October 2022, at Socratous 21 1011, 19:00
duration: 06/10/2022 – 06/01/2023 *by appointment only
location: Solonos 46, Socratous 21 & Kleanthi Christophide 32, 1011
press@theofficegallery.com
T +357 99 84 84 95
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¹ “La fleur conservée dans le plâtre, est une création remplie de poésie et d’éternité.”, trans. Ε.C.
² But is it not the case that when one loses one’s way one gains a wider view of the world? […] I invite you to discover La Ribaute with no preconception., A.K.
