BOSCH
2016 was the international year of Hieronymus Bosch. I was invited to take part in the group exhibition named "About those who are silent on board of the ship", which was a collective statement of young artists, inspired by one of his most famous paintings, "The Ship of Fools".
This project is an attempt to apply and interpret the symbolism of Bosch's paintings within modern existence, and also is the answer to the question of the digenesis: "where does our ship sail?”. My heroes are the new, free-thinking generation, people whom I admire personally: young painters, models, actors, tattoo artists, journalists and other cultural figures and activists. They find new ways of bodily self-expression with the help of tattoos, strange image and style – one could say that they become a walking manifesto of our generation, a living picture. It is these textured, strange, artistic characters that most organically fit into the surreal world of Bosch's paintings.
For me Bosch, on the one hand, is one of the most enigmatic, mystical, incredible authors, the first serious surrealist.
The artist obviously had some kind of his own portal to another universe. On the other hand, his paintings are not about
some distant fictitious worlds and not about some other people, all of his works are about us.
The process of preparing for the project and shooting proved to be very difficult. Despite the fact that I managed to attract a fairly large professional team, still it was not enough people on the set. I had to be simultaneously the photographer, the producer, the decorator and the technical expert all at the same time. Especially for this project, I even invented two two-meter LED lighting systems somewhat similar to Kino Flo. On one device I could make the temperature of light changes, and on the second – change color shades, which resulted in a very beautiful scenic light. In general, the project was an experiment and an adventure, but the guys from the team supported me and helped to find great and talented solutions throughout the whole process, and many of them did it for free, inspired by the very idea.
I used a manifold of lighting technics (e.g., the camera is static, the light device moves, so the volumes emerge) to create images in which there is color and light dynamics, sometimes even smeared – this, in turn, has allowed to avoid the realism and create the medievalism aesthetics. Scenic and voluminous images were also achieved with the help of professional retouching – on the postproduction stage we attracted Alexei Tikhonov, who loves complex tasks and therefore took up the project with great enthusiasm. The result surpassed all our expectations. Now I’m planning to gather a bigger team and develop this photo series into a full-fledged photo album, book or exhibition.
