The Purple Garden. Vrubel Palette
Remembrance is the shortest way to the past.
However, the fragile nature of memories forces us to rely on “visual prostheses”.
Photographic fixation, on the one hand, creates an “emanation of the past reality”: when you look at a photograph, you recognise it – the landscapes of memory become tangible.
On the other hand, there is the photographer’s desire to conceal the most intimate. This desire transforms the chaotic memories into a revelation that is always on the edge between reality and dream, “neither image nor reality, but a truly new being: a reality that can no longer be touched”.
The story of Mikhail Vrubel’s creative method unexpectedly confirms the idea of the series’ ambivalence. The artist added bronze powder to his paints to make them saturated and shiny, but before long they lost their original brightness and dimmed.
The purple-violet-mauve color, mysterious and polysemic, bright and bewildering at first, gradually fades, like the flickering light of a distant star that becomes indistinguishable as the sun rises.
The memory reveals itself and slowly cools down.
