“ReFLASHFUSIONS” was created between 2010 and 2012 as an attempt to liberate the photographic portrait from its flat existence.
I was interested in what remains when the image of a person is no longer just a surface, but enclosed in layers, between clarity and chemical decay, between document and corpse.
Some of my protagonists and friends have since passed away. Eternally frozen.
The photographs, all taken by myself, were cut into strips and embedded in several layers of synthetic resin. During the process, the pigments reacted with the resin; each layer coagulated differently, each figure developed its own chemical biography. Thus emerged these translucent bodies made of image, time, and chance.
The faces seem to look out from the depth of an ice wall.
They are both present and absent, frozen moments that melt again under the gaze of the viewer. They are not simple likenesses but condensed characters: encapsulated soul-moments, preserved in resin.
Every piece bears traces of reaction and resistance. Often, the final result harmonized eerily well with the personality of the person portrayed.
That was sometimes frightening, because the resin preserves, but it also destroys.
The surface is never smooth, never perfect. It feels as if the material itself remembers the memory of the subject, only to erase it again. Each photograph reacted differently to the chemistry of the resin: some portraits nearly disintegrated, others remained almost intact. The process itself was never purely manual, but a form of resurrection: Re-Flash, a second exposure, a Re-ignition.
The casting became a kind of ritual of transformation. The portraits look out from within a transparent coffin; they demand that the viewer move in order to truly see them. Only through physical engagement does depth reveal itself.
The observer becomes a second actor, “thawing” the image by shifting perspective, by a 3-dimensional dislocation.
The frozen soul no longer reacts from within, but mirrors the moment and mood of whoever is looking at it.
“ReFLASHFUSIONS” is a meditation on portraiture in an age of standstill.
In a world that reproduces faces by the millions, I conserve a single one, to rescue it from movement, and return it through the motion of the observer. It is my poetic inversion of photography, here, not light shapes the image, but matter itself.
Sometimes, when I was casting the portraits late at night, the resin began to breathe. Toxic tiny bubbles rose like thoughts, trapped halfway to the surface, as if the faces were trying to remember who they were before I sealed them in.
In those moments, I felt less like an artist and more like a witness or alchemist, watching the material take back control, deciding which parts of a person should survive the chemical sleep.There was always this quiet vibration in the studio, the sound of a life being archived.
The series was never completed.
It was and remains conceived as a long-term project, an archive of human conditions, a collection of frozen reactions that may one day thaw again.
Most likely, not much more of us will endure through the centuries, perhaps not even a single photograph, only our fleeting moment in nothingness.
With luck.
Carrara 2010 – Future
