Angelogram – 1999

 

There are words, there are obviously sentences, which are fit to introduce only Aliona Frankl’s pictures. They display themselves with arms outstretched, saying they are the ones, if I had not known. I would find some of them. Those who hear them, spread the word.

Pictures of this scribe of light, to introduce the pictures of that whom paints with light, words that introduce the photograms of light- ornamentation. From sentences.
Photo. Photograph. Photogram. Angelus. Annunciation. Picture, illuminative sketch?, angel, hail, Aliona!
It is clear to the observer that the angel is the photographer’s protagonist.
The angel who brought the very first tidings (glad news and command) appeared in the dream of the dreamer in the New Testament, telling him not to be afraid to take on his bride virginal even with child, for what she has conceived is from the Holy Spirit. The appearance of angels in the Old Testament, evoking times of a past many thousand years old, had similar missions. The Egyptian maid concubine, who had the descendant of her master in her womb, was brought back from her hiding by an angel, and the child is prophesied a prodigious future. And when the concubine is finally driven away with her infant – once again with the approval of God – it is the angel who shows the spring to the woman and child almost dying of thirst. Angels are, therefore, bearers of divine, glad tidings, of good turns, but, on the other hand, also act as performers of commands as interpreters, messengers and guides in more delicate matters, or if the client is inferior. (With more prominent persons the Lord himself consults.) But angels may be executors of terrifically strict commands from the very beginning. Two angels ruin the city of sin. And the list may go on and on enumerating tales of these winged soldiers and sisters of the Leader of the armies.
Angelogram. Photoangelogram. Alionangelogram. Photoalionangelogram. Aliona’s illuminative-angel-pictures.
These, of course, – unlike the practice of painting for centuries – are not just visually strict renderings of well-known biblical events. It is even uncertain that her angels are of the same kind as those of the sacred crew. The resemblance is indisputable, though, as her human figures are related to us and those in the Holy Bible also. ‘Temperate monsters` are known to us, as are situations that bring on such beings, precisely as they were known to the prophets` people or biblical soothsayers. As the Aliona-star, keyhole or `stormy weather` may recognize the vision-beings, the smoke pouring from the bottomless pit, so to say.
Annunciogram. Photoannunciogram. Alionannunciogram. Aliona’s picture tiding (picture postcard?).
“Each picture has its own history”, she says, meaning not only what she, on the other hand, does not talk about, how things came to her mind, what the idea was, where an object or beam of light came from, what it thus gains, and what it becomes in the moment (how and why?) when she, the photographer makes an exposure without a camera in the darkroom. I feel rather, that she is thinking of the fact that in her pictures the histories of all human and non-human beings crowd together and sublime. I say this, but these are mere guess-examples, the occasional heroic trial-and- error want to live, the wish to display and connect, or, say, wanting to fly. That of imagination and collapse. In a formulation which makes one confused: is it really ironic, or is it already reversed?
That not only the act of taking photographs can be understood as her one and only, playfully image-composing maché, but what she immortalizes, that which occurs on light-sensitive paper as a human story, which itself is an abstracting, sign-composing game? The air of figures imitating statue-making in the glass bulb of `statues on fire`?, role-playing in costumes on a glass stage?, the performance of puppet figures playing men, angels in some kind of ‘show-abounding`-globe? A romance-paraphrase in the broken-glass, open, yet closed, temptingly, dangerously injured, transparently complicated space of the pictures entitled `City of Loves`?
This way or else, but one can realize that these compositions are merely probing the history of the changing forms of light – which in itself is enigmatically exciting for the maker of photogram – but the impartation of stories for humans too. And also probing those which arrive at the borderline of `human` and perhaps proceed beyond.
Fotoalionannunciogram. Aliona’s saluting photographs.
`They create and spike also`, she says, and I understand this as meaning that the angels support each other with their wings, but also attack one another, are even capable of stabbing the other one with their wings; thus both are loyally dangerous. And the wings of this angel have caught fire, but for this reason only will not be entirely consumed by the flames. At most, they will leave their wings. We easily lose them. And they rip open the gates their inner hideousness, ruin and ravage; they are already murderous angels using their own selves as weapons – as they destroy themselves, the amputated, wingless, agonizing angels in the final stage of apparition.
They are the murderers and victims of story fragments of the heavenly apparitions at the same time: “And I beheld and heard an angel Flying through the midst of heaven, saying with a loud voice, Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabitants of the earth by reason of the by reason of the other voices of the trumpet of the three angels, which are yet to sound! And I saw a star fall from heaven unto the earth: and to him was given the key of the bottomless pit. And he opened the bottomless pit; and there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke and the pit. And there came out of the smoke locusts upon the earth: and unto them was given power, as the scorpions of the earth have power. And in those days shall men seek death, and shall not find it; and shall desire to die, and death shall flee from them. And I heard a voice saying to the sixth angel which had the trumpet, Loose the four angels, which are bound in the great river Euphrates. And the four angels were loosed, which were prepared for an hour, and a day, and a month, and a year, for to slay the third part of men. And the number of the army of the horsemen were two hundred thousand thousand, and out of their mouths issued fire and smoke and brimstone. By these was the third part of men killed…”
Photoalionannunciangelogram. The photographer, Aliona’s angelic hailing picture. The light-ornamentation pictures of murderous, hailing angels. On the light-sensitive paper, the angelically murderous, paralyzing air of madness.
And finally the last (or first) message, the message from the bottle. With regard to the survivors. From the smoke of the bottomless pit the debris-message, the word arising from the crumpledness of that whom is getting ready and tidying up his own way, a fragment of legacy – falls back ruinous, to be fixed, stretched to a glass wall, to keep and preserve itself for somebody yet. Or not.

 

Szerző: Pál Závada
Fordító: Gabriella M. Kovács
Nyelv: english
Megjelenés dátuma: 1999