Mestni trg 11/I
Ljubljana, Slovenia
Tuesday, January 28, 2014–Saturday, March 1, 2014
Janez Bogataj
Sonata for Sun and Fog
28/01/2014 to 01/03/2014
Opening of the exhibition: 28. January 2014 at 7pm
The opening speech will be held by Mr. dr. dr. Evgen Bavčar, essayist, publicist, philosopher and photographer.
4. February 2014 at 6pm: guided tour by Mr. dr. dr. Evgen Bavčar
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JANEZ BOGATAJ: GAZES OF A PHOTOGRAPHER AND POET
When the words of the author of this unusual photographic collection presents me with the invisible, the poem by Carl Sandburg comes to my mind – it says that fog is in its different roles, hues, positions and perspectives the mysterious leitmotif which provides these images with a special dimension: The fog comes/ on little cat feet. // It sits looking/over harbor and city/ on silent haunchnes/ and then moves/on.
Besides the punctum, as understood by Roland Barthes, this phenomenon tells us that every photograph contains the charm of the invisible. It is a kind of a visual revelation which can hint at a certain event or also a contrast to the discernible. When I listen to the descriptions of photographs, I recall what the poet Ivan Volarič – Feo said: „Mornings are most beautiful in the morning“ (an inner voice tells me you were right, my dear mate from grammar school and university). Bogataj's photographs confirm this witty notion which is at the same time reality of the photographer's work. It generously invited me to rich morning pilgrimages in search of the natural beauty which Kant compared with the beauty of a tulip. When I walk in my imagination through Slovenian landscapes, I know I must get up before the day fully awakens into reality, when the sun - the photographer of all photographers – only just begins its trip, when the golden chariot of Helios only just begins moving up on its celestial path. I cannot help remembering the great poet and translator Georg Haldas, who in a programme for France Culture told me that his father was a Greek and so was he, and that he taught him that he should every morning wait for the sun. This persistent waiting for the morning and the sun is a common denominator of all photographs made by Janez Bogataj. I try to relive these moments and get up early, so to listen to his description in the morning silence. Without this, I cannot follow him through Slovenia, which is otherwise invisible to me, yet very intensely present through his images and the warmth of his description. Fascinated by the beauty, I ask my friend of many years and famous critic Michael Gibson what he thinks of these photographs. He looks at them and tells me they are exceptionally aesthetic, even idyllic images. And then I again follow words in order to better understand the exciting silence which characterises these pictures. The author's voice confides in me how he photographed daffodils on Golica, in the noise of Avsenik's polka I see no further. Then I force myself to silence these sounds, make them ever dimmer, until the dancing song disappears and the daffodils come before my inner eyes, many daffodils which are like white pupils of the dead Narcissus: I may say this would be the most appropriate bouquet for the grave of the unhappy self-centred man in the faraway fairy Venice. Then I see a lake like a giant eye of the Alps, a mountainous world with the mysterious mist which is for me a cataract for viewing early mornings. I am even more moved when this ocular curtain appears as a reflection in water or when it seems that the departing night still rubs the sleepy eyes of darkness. Then I follow the triangular rock which is somehow reflected on the water surface as a square, reaching and halving two mighty mountains, and heavily dropping into the armchair between them. I also sense the parting of some imaginary eyelashes in front of the lake, as if protecting its surface, or I cling to a solitary tree trunk to be safe from the water's depth.
I am convinced that genuine photographs are only those which somehow offer us the opportunity to enter the landscape, to appropriate it, if only in our imagination. This is the charm as the poet says, of those „gentle paws of fog and mists“. I am becoming surprised by new images, those which emphasise the dual of fields in geometric symmetry, or those divided by the dual of a forest and a solitary tree in a clearing. I impulsively think of the author's creative loneliness in the innumerable mornings he has given us. These are very precisely measured moments filled with sediments of perceptions of atmospheres, primarily of silence. Then I pause for a moment, looking at the three swans which go somewhere far towards the left, as if not bothered by our presence. I am even more amazed by the two swans which only for a moment may pay no attention to the observer, only to hasten away each in its own direction and sing us the song of separation. The tree seems gothic to me, its verticality is prolonged into the belfry: when my gaze strolls up and down, I think I hear the distant toll of some distant yearning. I wonder a lot about those mists that rise above the earth like a haze and give one the sense that everything which is visible and material is awake. We could call them transcendental mists, as they strongly impressed the gaze of my third eye. Then I halt at the birches which seem as if they will never accept a lonely companion from some other photograph. The solitary birch also seems as if somehow rooted in its oneness and its place, because it will never be able to reach the company of its companions. It resembles and may even illustrate some Slovenian passive yearning.
Colours also enter me, slowly and carefully, yet not only when they as the only green bush jump into the objectively indifferent gazes, they are constantly evoked by the power of words. Complicated too are the colours of those photographs revealing time, that is living through the course of an entire year from spring to autumn, summer and winter. They are in a way the visual clock of duration, the barometer of passing, the colourful calendar of seasons, of the childhood and the green youth of nature, of Autumn, of life and death. I am also aware that all images contain a lot of what is invisible, places beyond the undulating landscape in the depth of perspective where my gaze suddenly stops, the rock from whose hardness water springs. The play of nature's elements is so convincing that I am tempted to kneel and quench my thirst in the very source of all things – as water was understood by the philosopher Thales of Miletus. As I am dreaming in the face of nature's beauty, I think I still hear Moses' staff striking the rock and inviting new waters. When I am awakened from reflecting by the narrative, I am in the gallery of these photographs. The viewers ask about the author, who has not come yet, though I hear a child's voice from the Chinese restaurant saying: look at the photographer, there he is, on the picture in which the path winds to the left in the middle of that wild landscape. He has gone, says the same voice, yet I see him descending past the branches above the lake's surface.
In hope that the real viewers will be also able to follow this Chinese wisdom, I am aware of the privilege I am granted in the descriptions of the author. These words affect me as a peculiar aesthetic analgesic against frustration, as I may never be able – or could not be able – to visit Slovenian landscapes. Yet I am certain that this inner visual visit overcomes all frustrations, as these photographic moments, unique as such, are a special gift for anyone who can observe beyond the visible. The photographs which I visited with the power of words provide an exceptional impression of atmosphere, duration and primarily the beauty of the moments forever dead, and photographs thus grow into their successful posthumous mask, which was once a moment in the landscape with Janez Bogataj and his lenses.
When his words stop, I too become silent to give absolute priority to the silence of images which will give birth, I am sure, to many new words and gazes. We should be aware that we do not have eyes to see, but – according to Heidegger – we have eyes because we see. The gaze is thus a consequence of some preceding spirituality. If a viewer is inconvenienced by the silence of the images, he or she can halt at the photograph which captures the feeling of the wind which smooths grass with an invisible comb, when it changes into the never fully explained word of duration and passing. And it is spotted in front of the reeds near the opaque water on which water lilies glide.
Dr. Dr. Evgen Bavčar
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JANEZ BOGATAJ
THE SONATA FOR THE SUN AND FOG
Slovenia according to Zen or how grass and trees become enlightened
Little has changed in the landscape photography of Janez Bogataj if we compare the motif world of the colour photography series Sonata for the sun and fog with the earlier black-and-white work. The still and silent world of thoroughly insignificant plants, nothing but grass, thicket and trees in relation to the environment, and the author who changes the landscape elements into metaphors.
Aristotle proclaimed the latter to be a great gift poets have. The author names his landscape series after titles borrowed from poetry and music. The Pastoral[3]is the title of a monograph with black-and-white landscapes from 2004, and the Sonata the sun and fog in colour continues with music metaphors.
A sonata (from sonare, Ital. to sound) is a musical composition for one or several instruments, yet not many. It usually consists of three or four separate movements, here they coincide with four sets of photographs made in 2009 and 2010 (Bohinj; Notranjska, Gorenjska, Koroška; Ljubljansko barje; Bela krajina). The primary instruments in Bogataj's visual composing are the sun and fog. The images sound silence, solitude and a pantheistic cosmic order which equates God with the world, with nature.
The notation of the compositions for the sun and fog is revealed in the principles of composition: picture planes, ascetically empty or saturated, in most cases open, diagonal static compositions, an abundance of applied spatial keys, which add to the illusion of spatiality. Colour perspective, the application of complementary colours which makes colours emphasise one another. Shadows, which play an important role in determining depth of field and dramatic quality, overlapping of shapes and consequent spatial gradation. The application of art variables: balancing directions (dynamic diagonals, passive horizontals, and verticals which signify growth and life), the relations little-much, empty-full, thin-thick, empty-saturated ... The images are teeming with contrasts. The upper angles of view prevail. The photographed objects seem inferior, left to their own destiny, impotent, yet they are at the same time the protagonists in the drama which unfolds before our eyes. Often used telephoto lenses, which further intensifie the said effect of the focused object. Quite ordinary plants become protagonists which participate in sometimes almost baroque, yet nevertheless simple, harmonic, balanced and persuasive spatial illusion.
Bogataj's works testify how closely he is connected with his own essence or how impossible it is for a sincere artist to conceal himself. After the photographer ceased to work as a photo-reporter for the magazine Mladina (1979 – 1988), he spent fifteen years almost exclusively for reading books, he likes nature, simplicity and solitude.
His photographs are reminiscent of Zen art, which emphasises simplicity and the importance of nature. Zen aesthetics is defined by the terms wabi and sabi. These amorphous concepts comprise the taste for simplicity, melancholy, solitude, naturalness, incompleteness and impermanence. Thus a well-used rustic jug is more beautiful than an old, meticulously made jug, since the latter stimulates only the senses, while the former stimulates the mind and the emotions to contemplate on the essence of reality.
The authordoes not, however, intentionally compose in a Zen manner, yet his art is so close to the attributes of wabi-sabi that one cannot help drawing parallels.
The essence of Zen philosophy is meditation, and when the author is taking photographs it seems as if he is meditating. His consciousness is concentrating only on stories in nature and he is pulled from this state of mind only when he finds the right motif.
Bogataj's landscape is felt according to Zen also because modern viewers, who have seen nature in photographs so many times that they are often fed up, avert their gazes; in order to feel these images they have to take some time and »sit for a while under the tree«, so they can absorb the personal understanding or worldview the author offers us with subtle compositional keys.
How Grass and Trees Become Enlightened
During the Kamakura period, Shinkan studied Tendai buddhism for six years and then studied Zen seven years. Then he went to China and there contemplated Zen for a further thirteen years.
When he returned to Japan, many people wished to speak to him and asked him unimportant questions. But when Shinkan received visitors, which was not frequent, he seldom answered their questions.
One day a fifty-year-old student of »enlightenment« said to Shinkan: »I have studied the Tendai school of thought since I was born, but there is one thing I cannot understand. Tendai claims that even grass and trees will become enlightened. This seems very strange to me.«
»What is the use of discussing how even grass and trees will become enlightened?« asked Shinkan. »The question is how you yourself can become such. Have you ever thought about it?«
»Never,« said the old man admiringly.
»Then go home and do it,« Shinkan concluded.
Renata Štebih