Marta Lesniakowska, Empty Room with Armchairs # 30 After Vermeer, 2022

collectible digital photography/archival paper Hahnemühle Photo Rag Baryta 315g
40 x 40 cm

limited edition: 1/5
signed on the front and on the back,
format 40x40 cm light/50x50 cm paper
Piece 1 of a limited edition of 5 pieces.
Work from the series "Empty Rooms." Empty interior as a variation of still life activates here an old iconographic strategy that never compromises. My memorable look recalls paintings by Johann Vermeer, with his favorite motif of a black and white floor. Vermeer, like many artists of his era, built his paintings using such geometric elements to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a flat canvas surface. I dedicate this photograph to Vermeer, the first artist of the modern era to use a camera obscura to achieve this effect. In a sense, my photograph penetrates into the secrets of his workshop: it shows the "Vermeerian" interior as a mise en scene, a setting that awaits the figures in his paintings - a girl reading a letter, weighing pearls, pouring milk. Thus, I invoke the notion of quotation as the guiding principle of re-presentation, which refers to other images, iconographic borrowings from the Western painting tradition, which are "invented" in the actual space and then secondarily subjected to aestheticization. In this way, my photography becomes an ontological event that can be read in a purely aesthetic layer. The formal language I have used here is significant: the pictorial field is disciplined by the principles of the poets-minimalists: economy of detail, uncovering hidden subtexts and allusions in unnoticed objects and fragments of everyday reality, the superficiality and mundanity of things. Sharpness, immediacy, simplicity of shot, precision of composition - all this shows that photography is not contingent/accidental, but, like painting, is capable of producing strong images that realize compositional order as a principle of compact and disciplined image construction. At the same time, the atmosphere of a detective novel is evoked, and its visual consequence: the aesthetics of neo-noire cinema: empty armchairs, one abruptly turned away, makes one ask what happened here? What did these two armchairs witness? I transform my photography into forensics, an image of a crime scene, a "witness in the case": a trace of what potentially happened inside. That's why the composition is based on geometry, light as parergon and low key film technique (reduced color image). Together with an earlier photograph: "Empty Room #24: After Vermeer" (2021), a detective story is constructed about "what is" and "how is." (ml).