The FotoLoft Gallery presents a personal exhibition of Zura Arabidze, a Georgian photographer and artist. Fifteen black and white psychological portraits… and no people on them but projection of the author’s emotions.
Zura Arabidze sees his models as a reflection of his perceptions; this is why they are different from the real ones. They are personification of his personal paradigm.
Images living inside of us, dreams, fantasies, the sky we looked through the sleepless nights, houses in which we used to live, all our memoirs remain inside of us, creating the person, the unique Universe of individual existence. And these are the objects of this personal Universe that Zura longs to demonstrate to the audience through the portraits.
For a photographer, the world surrounding is a reflection of his personal spirit, a mirror of his mental model and of his perception model. Therefore, taking pictures of people, Zura discovers something from himself, digs it from the depth of their subconsciousness and imprints; he superimposes his personal images on fading faces which become just the intermediaries of the author's spiritual beginning into the external world.
Overlaying of the shots and drawing on the print allow achieving a stereoscopic picture, uncertainty of senses; the strongly pronounced black and white contrast focuses you on the emotional content of the work. The faces are somehow breaking through the darkness of unbeing to the light and finding a new life in the author's photo-works.
There is something mysterious in Zura's works; in each print, the author gives us the symbol leading us to decoding of the picture. The shot superimposing is as overlaying of various layers of life; the figures reminding of cave art are engraved on the face as the experiences of the life journey.
The photographer catches the part of the face, which concentrates the artistic idea and leaves everything distracting in the darkness.
So, mixing different techniques, the artist as though balls the picture senses clue.
