LAVISH FIELDS
LAVISH FIELDS
CREDITS
The series Lavish Fields by Polish artist Robert Mainka (b. 1992) takes us to the free exploration of colours, scenes and atmospheres.
In high stylized that range from studio still-lifes to found objects, from staged portraits to digital renderings, the feelings that they release are similarly diverse: they show tenderness, estrangement, a sense of surreal, but also of familiarity with some of the subjects. The photographs featuring people look like theatre plays or experimental film stills, which shows Mainka’s transversal approach to photography.
Mainka explains that he’s not working from a central topic, but approaching his work more as an exercise of artistic theory. He says: “Art is about developing a more intensive relationship with reality, the development can probably can go on and on until a sudden explosion of a person’s head (skull) (boom!) when looking at a fork.” He then groups his images according to the four categories that are found on the final card of a Tarot deck, Le Monde, which is a woman dancing between four creatures (a bull, a lion, an eagle and an angel) representing the four basic energies of human life: bodily energy, sexual energy, emotional energy and intellectual energy.
The variety and the quality of the photographic languages is astonishing and ever-changing, each photograph containing a story within itself that could take off on its own and inspire a further series. However, in this instance, the photographer chooses to leave some things unsaid, and rather leaves the viewer’s curiosity for any one particular picture, unsated.
