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Valery Orlov
SMALL SIMPLE SIGNIFICANT
(photo 1990-1998-2008)
09.10.08 - 02.11.08
 All the works within this project...>>
It's amazing, how much one's works can tell about their author. Even photographs, in which, supposedly, dominates the 'unbiased technology'. That is how photos of Valeriy Orlov clearly show that he is a graphic. And graphics, happily, aren't capable of rivaling painted art, installations or multimedia for influence on the mass soul of the public, it is a humble and unfashionable art, but, on the other hand, an accurate one. And according to one's graphical works any more or less understanding person can tell, what one or another author is worth. Artistic photography, as can be deduced from the name, is also graphics. While avoiding unnecessary effects of painted art, it transfers reality into a compressed, emotionally concrete visual form. The level of an artist is determined here by the degree of effective conservation, absolutely agreeing with Blake's words about 'the world in a grain of sand'.
On Orlov's photographs there are only 'small, simple, significant' items against a gray background. All of them are things the author wouldn't bear to part with: the old, the usual, the loved. But to call their images portraits wouldn't be enough: too much conflicts here with the items 'of the air'. They are more like landscapes with figures, where the intrigue really consists of the changing relationship between an object and the space around it (or, if you like, between a subject and the world). From the amount of space, taken up by the object-subject, and the place, where it is put, may be determined the meaning of the image, the tone of its energetic vibration.
Also it is important to determine, what role the background plays in each case: a plane, with which the item correlates, or a foggy substance, in which it is embarked. Even the shadows - or their lack - are able to tell us much. A child's shoe weightlessly rests on an ideally gray surface; a boy with a walking stick glides in a foggy nothing, as if he's a character of some ancient Chinese script; a girl doll seen from somewhere in the sky; a castle and a necktie, closer than other 'characters' to the center of the paper, as if they wish to be introduced to us.
However such a lyrical description is very approximate and in no way does it express the difficult plainness of Orlov's photos, the summed up tints of the meaning and the image, enclosed in them. And most importantly, it doesn't express that unexplainable excitement, which comes with watching qualified art, at the same time keeping up the urge to look and satisfying it. And if we would try to understand what is the material reason for this excitement, we would see it in that substance, from which formed the space for the whole series, in the end this space condenses to the density of each of these items. His even gray fog, of course, as a prototype has the nonmaterial condition of white, liquefied in the image, reaching the density of the first substance. It could be expressed differently: the gray is a dusky from time old white. The past, which in photographs always stays the present.
Vladimir Levashov
(translated by Ksenia Ershova)
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