OVERPAINTED PHOTOGRAPHY
The project is inspired by the photographic method in 19th century called overpainted photography. The combination of photography and painting blurs the boundaries between reality and unreality, importance and unimportance to suggest the feeling of lost in transition and require audiences to understand the image in a different way. Back to the early years of photography, artists dedicatedly painted the colour pigments on the photographic surface to enhance the sense of realism of black and white images. This technique is once again approached in the context of post-modernism not as a representational form but rather a device for self-expression.
The act of applying colours on monochrome or colours images can be seen as emblematic for nostalgia, a longing for reunion and incorporation, for a repetition yet that cannot be repeated. Photography is the window to the past, it represents for something once was yet it no longer is. Thus, the overpainted photograph is an unrealistic play of visual language and amplify the concept of illusion to liberate the image from representation and reality. Being painted, the image is melancholy and haunting and opens a strange world of appearance and disappearance, visible and invisible, partiality and transcendence. The work creates the distance in time and space between reality and illusion but it is a way to transform and collapse this distance into proximity to the personal self.
