Object and Fetish
Every hour o’clock, Gabor Koleszar’s studio in Water Street
(Gastown, Vancouver) is invaded by the sound of the nearby steam clock, playing The
Westminster Chimes while a crowd of tourists take pictures of the simulated old machine.
When visiting there I cannot avoid to mentally bridge the clock and one of the issues
addressed by Koleszar on his photography based art: the representation of reality
as a tridimensional illusion on a bi-dimensional support, a concept which shaped Western
visual tradition since Renaissance. Such reign of trompe-l’oil along some
five centuries has certainly been catchy, seductive and feeding our tendency to try
to better understand life by reflecting it on the mirror maze of fiction and aesthetics.
However, Koleszar walks this path the opposite way, by using the proverbially “exact”
tool of camera obscure instead of the classical brushes and oil on canvas.
Traveling that road he eventually came up with some outstanding “painterly” representations
of reality like Battery Pack, a color print that gracefully conciliates a
flavor of the old Flemish painting school and the apparently banal subject that epitomizes
our current high-tech based civilization: energy.
During the 90s Koleszar often resorted to big close-ups, virtually turning objects
into abstract spaces that somehow evoked the oniric atmosphere of Andrei Tarkovski's
late films. On those works he handle a rare formal excellence, while juxtaposing
the modernist discourse to the contemporary questions addressed by them: Fiction-Reality,
Permanence-Impermanence, Organic-Non-organic materials and the trace we all may or
not leave behind. Those black and white works –some included in the current show-
brilliantly incarnates the artist ideal of “photographs as visions rather than images”,
a sort of alchemical process ignited when placing “ordinary matter (…) in extraordinary
dimensions”. 1
Koleszar’s recent work explores a new level of understanding –or better say wondering?-
on objects, the many metaphors underlying its substance and, at a bigger extent,
its physicality itself. He pulled “back from the object and (allowed) a three dimensional
space to emerge”2. This sincere step of showing the whole or a recognizable part
of selected subject matters –even verbally identifying them in some titles- seems
to me a gesture that, at once, flashes what is covered by the veil of aesthetic,
homage the duchampian Ready-Made concept, and points out our current obsession with
Reality –on and off TV.
Rafael Lopez-Ramos
Vancouver, December 2005
1- Koleszar, Gabor. Artist Statement, Vancouver, 2005, p.1
2- Idem.
