 VLADIMÍR
BIRGUS: SOMETHING UNSPEAKABLE
Using colours usually brings too much
reality to photographs; but it is not the case of Vladimír
Birgus's photographs, into which colours bring abstract
elements. Large areas in dominant colours bring unrealistic
atmosphere to them, so that they remind us of abstract
paintings more than of reality recordings. The author
makes use of spatial construction with the aid of flat
geometric spots, but his work remains provably photographic.
He ignores the rules of painting composition by leaving
parts of figures and other objects outside of the field
of vision, putting together near and distant space elements.
A combination of abstract-painting and quasi-reportage
elements in one photograph brings about a very
intensive impression of unreality. The figures, depicting
realistic-looking people in movement or gesturing, make
an impression of being located in a fictitious
space of an abstract painting defined by flat colour-spots.
Everyday view of a street, so well-known to all
of us, thus acquires a new meaning. Things we know
well – and take for granted – become mysterious and
unknown. In scenes that at first sight look random or
unexpected we find a specific accord of forms in
a surreal world. Two similar women walking on a Chicago
street, one of them depicted from behind and the other
from the front, look as if they were mirror images of
the same person. Shadows of two people walking down
the stairs from the Eiffel Tower are peculiar copies
of a woman in red dress who is walking upstairs.
A large orange spot high on the wall on a photo
from Gorzów, is a "copy" of the ball
played with by a small boy. We can also see here
shadows of the boy and the ball, which seem to be parts
of a different reality since the ball is higher
than the boy's hand, and not lower as it should be.
Shadows play an important role in most of Birgus's photographs.
They represent a strange world, parallel to and
as real as the one full of light and colours. Let us
have a look at the Rovinje photo: we can see three
shadows on the right hand side of the picture, and the
photographer's shadow in the central part, continuing
into the black depth in the middle, between two bright-red
areas – we witness here the world of light and the world
of shadows, and these two worlds are mutually intertwined,
blended and amplified. A Miami Beach dancer's photograph
shows real objects and their shadows in a nearly
symmetrical arrangement, as if mirror images that are
imperfect copies of each other; a shadow can be
a reflection of a real object or of another
shadow...
Vladimír Birgus is a master of creations that indicate
several different facts in one picture. A similar effect
can be and usually is achieved by a photomontage
of several negatives. His, however, are non-manipulated,
"clean" photos. His pictures' motifs usually
follow several plans, and each of them makes an impression
of being brought from a completely different time-space.
Let us take an example of five Barcelona jugglers, where
we can see five separately moving figures in five different
time-spaces. Watching Vladimír Birgus's photos that
seem to catch a situation "on the move,"
we may feel that the story hidden behind them could
be easily reconstructed, as if they were just freeze-frames
of a movie. Well, it is not so. If we make an attempt
at such a "reconstruction," we will immediately
find out that there is no relationship between the figures
and the story, it is more like freeze-frames of several
movies put together, a sort of an "anti-movie,"
which interprets the reality not as a linear "cause-and-effect"
sequence, but rather as several time-spatial frames
coexisting in parallel.
Vladimír Birgus's photographs, which express existence
of "two parallel worlds," ultimately bring
about cognition that is truer and more real than that
displayed in an apparently realistic film, which finds
artificial links between unattached facets of the complicated
reality we live in. In another, deeper meaning the photographs
reveal a different kind of parallel variability
of worlds. This deeper meaning can be found if we watch
several persons in a random group of anonymous passers-by:
each of them represents his/her individual perception
of the world. Still another meaning is hidden in the
mysterious substance of reality, in which objects and
their shadows create two intertwined worlds existing
within rules we know nothing about. Finally, there is
a meaning connected with the uncertain roots of our
perceptions, in which real facts are blended with illusions
– what we take for a direct contact may be a visual
image, an abstraction we create in an effort to view
and understand the world around us.
Elźbieta Lubowicz
(Lubowicz, Elzbieta: Something
Unspeakable.
Katalog, Galerie Měsíc ve dne, České Budějovice 2004.)
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