From the sparkle of a sea that “knows all the grays” to the graphic shadows of beech trees in mist and snow, Loredana Nemes transfigures a legendary land with breathtaking precision. Between nostalgia and dreaminess, we plunge into this black-and-white enchantment.
Crowned by a forest of hundred-year-old beech trees, chalk cliffs rise up out of the sea. We’re in Sassnitz on the island of Rügen, the largest in the Baltic Sea, close to Jasmund National Park (part of UNESCO’s World Heritage Forest). This is where Loredana Nemes takes us, in the footsteps of Caspar David Friedrich and so many other Romantic painters who came here in search of their motifs. Where “there’s no need to flee” for this expatriate, who fled her native Romania with her parents at the age of fourteen to settle in Germany. Where this uprooted woman can put down roots: “So my roots stretch out far, like those of the beech trees, all the way to the Carpathians. They wind through the stratified mountains to return to the trunk of my parents”, writes the photographer, who is also a poet.
It wasn’t until 2019 that the artist, born in 1972, made her way to the island of Rügen. Falling under the spell of this overhanging land, where she was dazzled to discover the Jasmund forest, reminiscent of the Transylvanian forests of her childhood, she decided to devote herself to the “ashen trees that know me, for I come from the Carpathians, from a land of neglected beech trees”. At the same time, she abandoned portraiture and genre scenes, to which she had devoted herself for twenty years 1. Grey Trees and Celestial Sea is the title of the photographic series she began then and continues today.
Sparkling and Graphic Effects
Born of a genuine fascination for this “sea at the edge of the forest […] [which] reflects light and knows all the greys,” the cycle (presented concurrently in Milan and Chaumont) skilfully deploys, season after season, the interweaving of the two motifs: trees and horizon, disregarding the cliffs whose jagged silhouettes we know from David Friedrich’s famous 1818 painting (The Chalk Cliffs on the Island of Rügen). Forgoing the picturesque to focus on the interplay of light and shadow, Loredana Nemes here demonstrates a certain inclination towards abstraction, already at work in her “Beyond” series shot through opaque glass, or the brightly coloured, totally blurred series inspired by the terrorist attacks perpetrated with trucks in Nice, Berlin and Stockholm.
“Grey is my favourite colour. Reducing the world to many grays is the first step towards abstraction, a detachment from reality on the way to the image. “
A veritable abstract painting reduced to two horizontal bands featuring all the gradations of black and gray, one of his Mer céleste (celestial sea) paintings (no. 28) admirably conveys the limpidity of the air and the depth of the sea. It’s also easy to understand the artist’s sense of calm in this silent place. Sometimes invisible, playing hide-and-seek with the branches of the trees, we always feel the presence of the sea, wafting its perfume of eternity, while the snow-covered or budding trees imperturbably mark the passage of time. With the same meticulous attention to detail, the photographer uses a palette of grays of fascinating richness and precision, translating the colour of leaves with the passing of the seasons, while on her vast expanses of water, the light shining through the clouds seems almost palpable… Beyond the “pictorial” motif, the sea serves here as a “reflector of sunlight”, while the shadows and reflections of the trunks create a spellbinding “graphic effect” 2.
- Behind the Curtain, 2003; Romanian Faces, 2003-2004; Under Ground, 2005-2008; Beyond, 2010; The Presentation, 2014.
- Anne Kotzan, Schwarzweiss magazin, novembre 2022
Graubaum und Himmelmeer” [“Arbres gris et mer céleste”]
Podbielski Contemporary, Milano
www.podbielskicontemporary.com
Until Febuary 10,
Chaumont-Photo-sur-Loire
Domaine de Chaumont-sur-Loire
Until Febuary 25
atelier@loredananemes.dewww.loredananemes.de
www.instagram.com/loredana_nemes
Italie – MILAN