LOOK AND GET LOST
"I create physical images that I want to look at, feel, and lose myself in. Again and again." Defining himself as "a darkroom artist", Helsinki-based Mikael Siirilä develops a highly poetic photographic work based on a "slow and contemplative process" aimed at giving the images "a certain serenity" into which one happily plunges.
The process of silver gelatin print (or silver gelatin photography) "allows you to obtain an image with deep blackswith an organic texture and appearance legacy " explains the Finnish photographer (born in 1978), thus revealing the main characteristics of his aesthetic. An aesthetic full of nuances 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 its framing, often off-center or marginal, giving pride of place to small nothings and voids.
Dedicated to the "themes of absence, presence, and marginality," the photographs of Mikael Siirilä reveal reality in its raw simplicity, but fragmented into pieces, like so many suspended momentsBy capturing the poetry of bodies and things that are simply there, visible but not ostentatious, and often even hidden or usually neglected, he manages to transcend the banality of the most trivial everyday life, and to reveal the magicHands, backs, toes, napes, foreheads, shoulders, hair…; busts, truncated furniture or paintings; a label, a plastic bag, a bottle, a staircase or a doorknob… fragments or details occupy the entire frame, the minute is promoted to the forefront, the neglected, celebrated… Mikael Siirilä shows us the world through a narrow lens, not to hide reality from us, but to reveal it to us. revealand uncover its poetry and beauty.
“For me, the power of a photograph is to suspend the narrative, to freeze something […]”, explains the artist, for whom photography is a way to "contemplate" and "reflect on human existence" 1This research thus involves giving the invisible and the mysterious, the hidden part, the greatest importance…
1.Quotations from the article “Mikael Siirilä: in suspended narration” by Lou Tsatsas published on January 10, 2022 in Fisheye magazine.
