PHOTOFOBIA
[ILINCA BERNEA | Curator]
Photophobia is a symptom of abnormal intolerance to the visual perception of light. As a medical symptom, photophobia is an experience of discomfort or pain to the eyes, due to light exposure or by presence of actual physical sensitivity. The images are produced in the brain and re-transmitted to the retina; they are not products of the eye. The series of works by Dan Voinea, collected under the title "There from where nothing can be seen", addresses photophobia as an allegory of a crisis of the sight - image binomial and as confusion syndrome: inability to clearly focus a reality. The sight no longer has a point of support. The world has become an informal and confusing magma of suggestions, impressions, concepts and sensations. Photophobia also alludes to the runaway from visibility and to the anxiety resented in contact with a confusing, discordant, atonal and inconsistent reality, in which man no longer finds a vital center. Dan Voinea paints invisible spaces and a state of existential baffling. It refers to the condition of the contemporary man, in permanent transition between various realities and media, captive without a goal in an increasingly relative, volatile world, which lacks a primordial nature. The Simulacra, according to Baudrillard, replaces all the layers and sublayers of the world; we live in conceptual fields and the representation successfully blocks almost all the access paths to what was once called ”being” and what was called ”world”. They supported each other through a mutual epic that merged fiction with biography, an epic that has vanished nowadays. The characters in the works are captive in an objectless narrative, frozen in the void. Their identity is as imprecise as the connection with the vague space in which they are placed. They have strange, sleepy appearances and seem to be touched by a state of consciousness' blindness. Apparently they are depersonalized, floating themselves in virtuality. The rupture between consciousness and the environment - exposed elliptically and in a chromaticity suggesting noise and disorder - shows the confusing and problematic connection the contemporary man has with a world that is becoming more and more prolix and inconsistent. Face expressions allude to Musil's "Man without Qualities", a man whose identity is exposed to a continuous erosion process. "Is not the only spiritual deficiency that the spirit is spiritless?" Musil asks. Contemporary man lacks direction, he is a wanderer among debilitating realities, who knows neither where he is going to nor what he is looking for. If modernity emphasized on the one hand the will of the individual, his liberties and passions, and the refuge in inner realities, the post-modernity no longer can provide a sufficiently significant world, clearly defined, wherein man can comfortably target his wishes. If the artists of modernity have yet to express an overflow, contemporaries have to express the void. The boundary between the inside and the outside world has become blurry, there is no more inner vitality, from which one to extract his vital force and a substantial exteriority, convincing enough to provide sources of fulfilment. The resources of consciousness itself are exhausted. Instead of the abundance of meaning, a radical nihilism has established. Reasoning and its crises alter and dissolves sensitive contents and erects new walls in the way of human subject's relationship with the media in which he moves. "We no longer project into objects the same feelings, the same phantasms of possession, loss, renunciation, jealousy: the psychological dimension has dimmed, even if we can always spot it in detail." "It is an immense reversal of all rational structural and power-making efforts", states Baudrillard in "The Other Through Himself". Photophobia, in Dan Voinea's works, is the expression of rebuff to contact with everything that means diurnal existence. His characters are touched by sleepwalking. They both are and are not present, they are disconnected from the space in which they appear. The style evokes the contours, the morphology and the dynamics of palpable reality and the impressionistic dissolutions of the image - which seems to break into emptiness - relate to the ambiguity of purely mental representations whose vision is blurry, diffused, interrupted by shadows. Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us.” ― Jean Baudrillard Photophobia is towards this false visibility of things, towards "simulacra," towards all virtualities that have swallowed and substituted any possible access to a reality that human consciousness could identify as genuine. Ferry shows in Homo Aestheticus that abandoning the attempt to reproduce the reality, meant, for the artist, a plenary assertion that art is a pure expression of his subjectivity.