The Japanese Shunsuke Ohno and Belarusian Igor Savchenko meet for a subtle conversation at RTR gallery.
Shusnuke Ohno and Igor Savchenko lives are a priori completely different. Everything opposes them: the age, the roots, the geography of the career. But their visions and discrete methods bring them together and offer landscapes with crossed melodies composed on the same note. The two artists tell the landscape in an infinitely pure and frontal manner. They make us feel its essence. The result raises a poetic depth and a sensual narration. Everything blends into the landscape and becomes a part of it : still volumes and forms, people, lights, colors, and the artist himself. The eye of the viewer approaches the lens of the camera.
Igor Savchenko’s unique prints in small format, a 55 years old Belarusian photographer are "paper shots" - the shooting is done directly on paper. Thus, he avoids the modified reading of reality (as in the case of classical model : camera-film-paper). He is obsessed by detail and gray tones, with subtle effects according to the distance from which one looks at an object, the most ordinary views of our world. Buildings, branches on the ground, layers of snow, abandoned objects, black trees: a digest on a rectangle of 13 x 18 cm. To enlight his approach, Savchenko relates to an anecdote, the reaction of two German passers-by towards what he is photographing: "Nicht verstehen!" ( "Nothing understanding") For the first one, there is no photography without interesting object. For the second one, the motivations are hidden and emanate from a trivial subject. Savchenko pays particular interest to the construction of veiled and implicit contexts and the potential attitudes of viewers towards these contexts. It is a study of the immaterial, unique, a harnessing of the electricity unleashed when we interact with his photographs.
Shunsuke Ohno, young Japanese photographer, although very curious traveler, is troubled by Tokyo, "the weirdest city", he says. He has been living there for 5 years. "1 second in Tokyo," Serie of 30 photographs, is an account of the cacophony of the city, its beats and its melody. Shunsuke wants to put music and photography together. He evokes experiences that fascinate him: the film by Paul Auster, "SMOKE", in which the owner of a tobacco takes a photo a day during 8 years from the same vantage point, and Kikai Hiroo’s photographs who made portraits from the same angle for 30 years.
While Savchenko offers us rows of images that look alike each other, made each time with a slight shift of perspective, Ohno makes us visit a chaotic city, both colorful and vibrant, one image by location. But one may suspect that to deliver a final image, Ohno Shunsuke had to make dozens of catches, with slight displacements, to finally find the good one, the most relevant one. He confides that it happened to him to climb on a car or to stand behind a tree in order to get the best angle. The vagueness of human figures, vehicles and especially trains going full speed, obtained with a long pause, open us a door to another dimension, an universe worthy of The Matrix.
The geometry of the composition and the rhythm seem dissonant between the two photographers, but this slight asymmetry is suggesting the nuances of their photographic melody. Discreetly. Moderato.
