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Copyright Andrei Farcasanu
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The British Journal of Photography website carries an article dated 26
August 2020 about Romanian Barcelona-based photographer Andrei Farcasanu. He is one
of two winners of the 2020 OpenWalls Arles photography ‘Growth’ category award for his Timeless Interventions set.
He handcrafts small lith prints,
mostly of nature and inanimate objects.
The fuzzy coolness of the photographic process reminds us how our
perceptual apparatus is a filter as much as it is a communication channel: the
chemical bath reduces the clarity of the image, while our brain chemistry
reduces the clarity of what we absorb from the world.
To me, the images in Farcasanu’s
output are reminiscent of Maya Deren and Alexander Hamid’s 1943 Meshes of the Afternoon, a compilation
of details abstracted from reality clutching at a broader meaning. Farcasanu’s work to date though has a
relatively narrow range, limiting the possible associations.
He arranges his photographs
thematically, but the themes are imposed retrospectively, indicating an
arbitrariness to the grouping of some of them.
Monochrome provides a unity that would not have been possible with
colour, and they are rescued from a charge of banality by the historical
gravitas of black-and-white, plus no doubt the attractive printing.
The results are then dressed up in
a philosophical framework; the BJP
article refers to Farcasanu ‘drawing on the metaphysical philosophies of
thinkers from Augustine of Hippo in the 5th century to Immanuel Kant and Albert
Einstein,’ plus references to inspirations drawn from impressionist,
expressionist and Eastern European painting and Eastern philosophy.
Throwing in what feel like random historical
figures and art movements adds nothing to an understanding of these small
images, though it is relevant Farcasanu has a PhD in photography, which would
have entailed supplying a theoretical superstructure. However, stabs at exaggerated profundity do
his modest photographs, more style than substance, no favours.
