Photography, in sum, is an banal image of the plausible, but a banality that always conceals mysteries. What to do of these “sibyls” when the reality never stops fleeting, slipping on the elusive. In Eastern philosophy, as well as for Walter BENJAMIN, the reality is a truncated illusion, an appearance that we attempt to touch, an ephemeral of light. It is precisely here, in this evanescent light, in this white essence, that Anatoly IVANOV draws fluorescent registers that will feed his black box.
These light spasms, these refracted cog wheels are being injected in his camera, rather than being captured. The result, it should be said, is quite strange, undecipherable writing engraved in a mental frame that is strenuous, almost anguishing.
Other photographs will be more serene, as if the lights of the city have just left their crumpled reality, to stretch or to self-deplete on the ironed smoothness of the photographic film. His images of reality have lost all conventional reading, all recognizable identity, all unbearable banality, all rational interpretation: they will be the reflection in a reflection of a reflecting reality. These miasmas of irritating lights fidget under the heated skin of the image, as if the latter had difficulty to restrain them, to restrain itself.
Sometimes Anatoly IVANOV will risk doing portraits, as the image of Alexandra REBENOK in a corridor of the LESS club. The light of a greenish fluorescent light-tube fades onto her face, the woman stands with unease in front of the camera as the perspective vanishes. All portraits created by the artist “bite through” the malaise of being, reduced to a formal model like a pipe elbowed in the conscience of its bodily embarrassment. This distant and slightly perverse realism gives portrait photography a language of sensitive truth, recessed from the apparent coldness of image processing.
Anatoly IVANOV slices with his camera this luminous cruelty, these clarities of conscience, in an almost instinctive manner. Each photograph will act as a letter of an unknown alphabet inside the torments of our being. This confused feeling might announce a new vocabulary imaged for a new generation, Russian or not, who has exhausted the linguistic registers of the real.
These lights that converse with the prisms of truth are truly a product of magmatic receptivity, as if our reality was engulfing itself in a fusing light, that only the camera of the artist would be able to cool down. The image, like a hardened lava, like a face too tense, smolders and disguises beneath its visible surface the hot mass of a fluid reality, inaudible… impossible. Through these cracks, we catch a glimpse of the incandescent presence of a chaotic world from wherein it appears, but also a glimpse of yet another reality… this time possible.
/ Frédéric BOUGLÉ / Independent art critic and director of Creux de l’Enfer Center for Contemporary Art in Thiers / FRANCE / 1998-01
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