LOOK AND GET LOST
"I create physical images that I want to look at, feel and lose myself in. Over and over again." Describing himself as "a darkroom artist", Helsinki-based Mikael Siirilä's poetic photographic work is based on a "slow, contemplative process" designed to give the images a "certain serenity" into which we happily plunge.
The silver gelatin print process (or silver gelatin photography) "produces an image with deep blacks, an organic texture and a timeless appearance", explains the Finnish photographer (b. 1978), revealing the main characteristics of his aesthetic. An aesthetic full of nuance and delicacy, characterized by the velvety depth of blacks and the softness of ivory whites (sometimes tinted with tea), but also, and above all, by thestrangeness of his framing, often off-axis or on the bangs, giving pride of place to little things and empty spaces.
Dedicated to "themes of absence, presence and marginality", Mikael Siirilä 's photographs show reality in its raw simplicity, but fragmented into pieces, like so many suspended moments. By capturing the poetry of bodies and things that are simply there, visible but not conspicuous, and often even hidden or habitually neglected, he manages to transcend the banality of the most trivial everyday life, and reveal its magic. Hands, backs, toes, napes of the neck, foreheads, shoulders, hair...; busts, furniture or truncated paintings; cardboard boxes, plastic bags, bottles, staircases or door handles..., parcels or details occupy the whole frame, the minute is promoted to first place, the neglected, celebrated... Mikael Siirilä makes us see the world through the small end of the spyglass, not to hide reality from us but to reveal it to us, and bring its poetry and beauty to light.
"For me, the power of a photograph is to suspend the narrative, to freeze something [...]", explains the artist for whom photography is a way of "contemplating" and "reflecting on human existence " 1. A quest that implies, therefore, giving the invisible and the mysterious, the hidden part, the greatest place...
1 Quotes from the article "Mikael Siirilä: en narration suspendue" by Lou Tsatsas, published in Fisheye magazine on January 10, 2022.
