Transfiguration or 17 On By Giorgi Shengelia

The passion for turning light into shadow, day into night, one image into another, takes Giorgi Shengelia from bright spaces into the darkroom. He chooses the darkroom as his territory of experimentation and exploration; where by manipulating light, the artist transfigures humans, animals, plants, snow, rain into a visual order of light and shadow. ‘Here’, in the process of sculpting light, time takes shape and shadow takes colour. ‘Here’ is Giorgi Shengelia’s experimental territory which is created through technical, chemical and deeply aesthetic explorations - from shooting an image to printing it with his signaturemethod.

Operating through materials, spaces, sources of light and image, and obtaining multi-layered image throughmodifications, is Giorgi Shengelia’s recent artistic challenge, aspiration, goal and desire. The space of his experiments turns the image into a kind of ‘visual haiku’, which is saturated with melancholic delicacy and nostalgia for the lost, faded world; and similar to haiku, it seems to fit the whole universe in 17 syllables. The multi-layered image, the artist is working in the darkroom is loaded with meanings and the increasingly rare luxury of enjoying the ephemeral in the relentlessly accelerated rhythm of rational modernity, along with the reflectios on infinite to finite.

The photo series were created between 2019 and 2021.

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