Subtle Infinities

Anatoly Orlovsky possesses an artistic temperament characterized by lyrical and analytical qualities. In addition, the photographer accesses a form of shamanic vision that allows him to identify to a large extent with the objects of his gaze in their meandering complexity – surface texture, sheen, grain, play of light, matness and transparency become more than objects of photographic contemplation under his lens: there is joy and immanence in the way he appropriates the environment via the camera eye. Analytical and lyrical features combine in an open-ended and unexpected way to charge the picture with forms and apparitions to which we are not used.

A mathematical propensity to combine and to compose has guided the art of Anatoly Orlovsky, allowing it gently to evolve from lyrical visions of northern nature to fictitious – virtual, if you will – landscapes, wherein the wielder of the camera eye enjoins the viewer of the photo print: “Please, what are you really seeing? A hill, a tree, a flower? You will not guess … because I propose a wooden surface, a slab of wet asphalt, a shop window, a glistening splash of water”. Call it trompe l’oeil if you will, it is a question of the mutability of appearances. The photographer is a connoisseur of mathematics, who uses the gentle touch and delights in transformations of qualities – as in group theory – or in following, as if winding along a thread, specks of light, increasing or decreasing stains, colour motifs, across groups of photos. For him, the world is obviously not cast in stone, but it is infinitely and miraculously transformable – and he invites you, the viewer, to embark on a journey of optical discoveries.

The nothernness is by now connoted by telltale signs: shiny patches, grey patches, transparencies that symbolize ice… Wherever he goes, whatever he photographs, Anatoly Orlovsky introduces these very private boreal references in his frames, as a kind of existential assurance, not to lose the initial impetus.

“These pictures are in fact essays in painting with a camera”, writes the artist in notes for the exhibition. “Yet, image manipulation was deliberately avoided in order to emphasize the readymade nature of the forms captured through the lens. (…) My photographs embrace the lyrical sensibility of romantic or expressionist painting, the process of their making – an act of capturing what is already there in the world, fully formed -is in stark contrast to the nature of painting as an act of making new forms”. Photo titles make some reference to names of American abstract expressionist painters.

Warm colours pervade the images presented in the artist’s latest show entitled Painterly Light, presented by the Luz Gallery in Montreal. It seems to be a bit of a tropical capriccio, perhaps influenced by the esthetic of rhythmic movement. The ochre, orange and red earth hues add to the complexity of the frames, yet they equally create a welcome tension between the decisive northern vision and suggestions of desert and heat. Landscapes are implied – we make of them what we will – dunes, hills, maybe icebergs in the sunset, polysemy is an important structural element, as in abstract painting, of course. Some images are inlaid with a kind of calligraphy. It is all in the eye of the photographer and of the beholder, because what we see is very far from the urban textured and coloured surfaces caught numerically or on film to compose the images. A sheet of ice or glass seems to be interposed between the viewer and the themes photographed, adding a boreal inlay to the “dancing” tropical tones.

Anatoly Orlovsky is also a composer of contemporary music and a pianist who interprets his own compositions, whose sounds translate fragments of landscape and states of matter. The two art forms, photography and music, are clearly complementary and form an exploration of the artistic potential of the world, revised by mind and sensibility. The calligraphy in the photography and chromatic scales suggested within the context of the different works, are an answer to plays of textural sound and implied rhythm. This is not a Gesamtkunstwerk, but a profoundly felt appeal to the expressive ranges of the spirit, because at the base of the arts, there is probably a cognitive matrix, urexpression, common to all of them. An explorer of the artistic spirit, Anatoly Orlovsky moves between music and photography to point out the infinity of combinations of notes, pitches and rhythms that may make our world infinitely interesting, if we have the energy and the curiosity to look, listen, think, feel, vibrate…