What we witness in this new series of Bekor’s is a transformation of a human into a butterfly. The metamorphosis is thorough as if Bekor had discovered a race of humanoid caterpillars and had documented their submersion into cocoon and re-emergence as winged dabs of brilliant hue and luminous tone. Seductive as it is, however, the fantasy is not the point, or at least raison d’être, for the series; it is, if anything, the excuse. Bekor indulges us in the color itself and its seeming kineticism, inventing a choreography of nature creatures drunk on the rainbow. This he achieves by, in essence, re-photographing photographs: he projects his images of pure and patterned color onto the bodies of models posing and moving in his studio and capturing the shapes that emerge thus. The formula is simple, but, as is apparent, the results are elaborate and dazzling.
Bekor operates on several levels here, ranging from the narrative, as described, to the entirely abstract. Along this metamorphic trajectory, at once paralleling and embodying the butterfly’s natural growth, homo sapiens experience a fairy-tale existence, or at least a dream, a delirium of re-invention that subjects dreamer to a ritual of purification and that transports the viewer through all-encompassing hallucination – hallucination triggered by Bekor’s employment of an improbably vivid palette and impossibly fluid line.
For all his painterliness, Giuliano Bekor is not a “painterly photographer” in the manner of, say, the Pictorialists of the early 1900s or the abstract street photographers of the mid-century. Availing himself of photographic techniques, digital and analog alike, that were barely imagined in the Modern era, Bekor works in a realm of hyper vision that still seems foreign to the art and craft of photography – even as it electrifies the myriad pictures we pore over all day on our laptops and mobile phones. Bekor’s art doesn’t simply match the ferocious visual intensity of digital coloration, it ratchets up that intensity yet further, frees it from the internet, and ripens it before your eyes – the eyes of the beholder.
Written by Peter Frank, JM Art Management.
