MENTAL IMAGES
© Thomas Boström 2007
Translated from Danish: Martin Bielefeldt Christensen
Originally, Pernille Koldbech Fich’s photographs are generated by an intuitive sense of something unforeseen and by an instantaneous evocation of something invisibly different – something often alarmingly existential and common to all mankind. The motifs examine the spiritual or metaphysical level from an artistic strategy, where the portrait becomes the sphere, from where the reality of the pictures is enunciated.
Koldbech Fich’s method is spectacular: previous to the actual photography shot, the artist establishes scenographic constructions, inviting entirely different and mutually unknown extras to enter into artificial relations, cutting across age, status, looks and gender. On a previous day – before the day the photographs are taken – this odd gathering takes place; a gathering where the relations between the anonymous models are tested and laid out as a track, from which the content of the psychological picture is implemented. The situations included in the photograph which we look at are given a past and thereby a temporal course.
The camera’s characteristic ability to capture these moments results in a photographic document, which the viewer, through intuitive and emotional rhetoric, is offered and compelled to take a stand on. The viewer is invited to the gathering, but still there is a barrier, typically visualized through the set-up, with the recurrent backturned sofa, preventing us from capturing and mastering whole pictures all at once. Thus, the situations take place on the photographs’ own premises. On the picture’s illusory and mysterious level. As in the private zone of every individual thought or emotion. Thus, ‘planlessness’ occurs in an alternation between the spontaneously uncontrollable outcome and the distant and accurately planned scenography of the dark surroundings.
However, the place that constitutes the framework of the particular staging is paradoxical. More precisely, the location consists of lifelike yet silent tableaux, which are open to action – as something which takes place a priori, or aims at a future for the almost painful moment, which the persons seem trapped in. The moment allows us to gain a highly specific insight into it. However, the location – in the melancholic provocative framing of the monochrome walls and floors – seems to be ahistorical and timeless, and, at the same time, able to thematize something universal and at all times occurring and relevant.
The artist depicts something incomprehensible and differently grandiose within human nature, as well as a conception of an intimate human sphere within the body, which is very physical and concrete. A sublime endeavour and a temporal worldliness. Momentarily, Koldbech Fich ventures to lose grip on her search for the moment, which enables her to capture the mental and perhaps picturize a centre in man’s inner universe. A temporally absent yet existentially fruitful space, which cannot be captured by others, but remains an individual freedom. Pernille Koldbech Fich’s exhibition Introducing Viola is an ambitious and relevant interpretation of this theme.