… The ten-piece black-and-white series by the artist is the private treatment of lithographed postcards, memories from old albums and found pictures – through the conscious expansion of the generic borders of the technique of photography by a professional technical feat. In the photos that evoke the form of old TV sets of the 1960s and the nostalgic visual universe of the cinema of the period memories, events and moods of a relationship appear. In each photo a personified, emblematically terse slogan appears as an epitaph commemorating certain periods, stages, shades of the relationship. The ten pictures are ten private gravestones, reminiscing funeral orations, which are linked by the fictitious and loose narrative of personal crisis. In spite of their ironic alienating effect – or perhaps precisely because of it – the manipulated images lifted from their age, context and genre, the picturesque use of photography and the absurd epitaphs evoke an elementary sense of death, loss and grief. The ill-matched elements, the randomly chosen snapshots, the meaningless, neutral and blurred surfaces with the embarrassingly banal or absurd inscriptions create a disturbing dissonance, tension in the spectator. We yearn to comprehend the events, to peek in, to get to know the story, to reconstruct it.
Orsolya Merhán
