Fauna #3 emphasizes "color as transformational, alchemical tool to transmute what you see into what you would like others to see." The work uses vibrant chromatic palette to explore feminine transformation through color itself as active agent. Gerliczki's selective focus and layered floral elements create composition where woman's form becomes vehicle for color exploration, her body canvas for chromatic experimentation that transcends realistic representation. The "energetic" color application suggests vitality and power, while maintaining series' dedication to presenting women's "largely unseen qualities" through beauty and wonder only nature could produce.
“I am presenting women as powerful as any man. Each woman is decorated with the most common and beautiful flowers. Each picture is powerful in color, energetic, and pure in nature, their expression is innocent.” Your images point toward qualities of women that go largely unseen, yet you seek to reveal through beauty and wonder. The colors and shapes perfectly illustrate the idea of “beauty and wonder” in a way that only nature could produce. Your painterly photos are portraits that use the feminine body as a canvas, showing the viewer each subject’s personality, expressiveness and mystery. The sense of fluid movement creates aesthetic tensions between the contrasting lights and darks in the photos, placing the viewer in a dream-like world of compositions where surreal figures are juxtaposed against painterly frames - layered on top of one another in a way that compresses space and altars the context and sense of scale. The compositions become like another world where sensuous body figures merge with the environment and transform to become new compositional structures. These imaginary worlds remove the viewer from their commonly understood vantage points because it’s impossible to know where the photographer’s eye is in relationship to the subjects. Using this technique you take the viewer into more surreal, magical worlds. By compositionally emphasizing light and color through selective focus, you create compositions that promote feelings of delicacy and gracefulness. You put the viewer in a position to speculate what and where it is they are seeing. Because of this, the images evoke ideas around vantage points, perception, and imagination. There is a sense of silence, softness, and a fluid movement into alternate realities within these photographs and the use of color as a transformational, alchemical tool to transmute what you see into what you would like others to see adds a layer of depth to the work that is appreciated by viewers from all walks of life.
Fauna #3 uses chromatic alchemy—vibrant color transforming female portrait into exploration of beauty, power and natural wonder. Archival pigment print from Fauna series. Available at The Art Design Project, Miami Beach.
