Ori Gersht @ Angles Gallery
Published in Beautiful/Decay magazine
Ori Gersht @ Angles Gallery
Ori Gersht’s recent multi-media exhibition at Angles Gallery evokes a dialectical stance- a supreme beauty in destruction, an explosive dynamism in morbid quietude. His images of exploding flowers– ironically memento moris of sorts already– have been catalysed through their untimely pre-emptive demises into pulchritudinous spectacles.
Gersht’s stills of flowers- frozen with nitrate, blown to pieces by pyrotechnics- have a steely delicacy and a brittle preciousness, as if transmorphed into porceline simulacras of themselves. Gersht images them suspended in an evocative and painterly foreboding fog, lending them a certain lugubrious vulnerability and romanticism. They unfold as macrocosmically omniscient visions in microcosmic instances. Like Ansel Adams, Gersht finds a galaxy in a reflective pool, an interstellar universe imploding and recreated within a twinkling vase of flowers, in the blink of an eye, or the hold of a breath.
I am instantly reminded of Northern Renaissance “Pronk” still lives, for their prodigious verisimilitude and ostentatious display of wealth. But perhaps a more apt comparison is the contemplative mysticism of Juan Sanchez Cotan’s monastically austere works from the Spanish Baroque. Gersht’s images are, in fact, quite revelatory; displaying a liminal reality imperceptible to mundane human consciousness. Gersht’s title, “Time Folds,” is quite apropos in that the typical progression of time is disrupted, re-ordered and recontextualized, allowing visual secrets to be conjured from dusky darkness, the void of unknowing, an evanescent expanse. As Walter Benjamin theorized in the “Optical Unconscious,” Gersht uses photography in a meditative fashion to unearth the “full potentiality of perception.” Or, as Descartes described, “In order to be more perfect as images and better to represent an object, they ought not to resemble it.”
Of course mimetic quality and the nature of reality/illusionism has long since been a primary concern within the canon of Western art- and I can’t help but read Gersht’s terrorism upon the seemingly innocuous genre of the still life as a subtly transgressive Duchampian move- a slightly more ominous, yet still playful mustache painted on the Mona Lisa. In a circumspect gesture, he literally “blows away” the artifice of the flowers; icons of prosperity, fruitfulness, and aesthetic beauty; a stand-in for Western art as a whole, or at least the problematic mask behind which it hides. In this sense perhaps they are closer to dissimulations, subverting their own heightened realism by calling attention to the cheery façade, the interventative act, and thus questioning the nature of object and referentiality as such. In a circuitous fashion, Gersht calls attention to buried collective memories, subverted histories of violence, massacre and deceit that lurked behind such lusciously magnanimous visions. Without the masses of slave labor the landed elite “employed,” images of such ample luxury and easy leisure would not have been possible.
Fittingly, Gersht claims the images are inspired by Henry Fantin-Latour’s flower paintings- charming glimpses at seemingly impeccant arrangements. During Victorian times, however, flowers embodied a highly regulated language of color and form to convey sentiments that men and women could not openly express, due to social mores. Whether amaranth for immortal love, or marigolds for pain and grief, flowers sent embedded messages to the recipient. Coincidentally, Gersht’s flowers are depicted in the nationalistically nuanced palette of red, white and blue. Furthermore, his video “Blow Up” features the wail of Israeli sirens played at dawn and dusk on Holocaust and Memorial Day- traditionally functioning as a call to remembrance. In our contemporary society’s current anxious clime, perhaps Gersht’s fracturing flowers are sending a subtly coded message to the “secret public” of those who question domination and its tendency towards propagandistic re-visions of harrowing realities.