Szymon Roginski, Projekt UFO 07, Epson ink print on Hahnemuehle PhotoRag Pearl paper
NICOLAS GROSPIERRE – HYDROKLINIKA; SZYMON ROGINSKI – PROJEKT UFO
GROSPIERRE NICOLAS, ROGINSKI SZYMON
Curator: Adam Mazur, Nissan M. Perez
3 May — 7 June, 2008
About Nicolas Grospierre’s – HYDROKLINIKA / By Adam Mazur
Nicolas Grospierre – Hydroklinika, 2004
Nicolas Grospierre was born in Switzerland and is a French citizen of Polish origin. He grew up in France but moved to Poland in 1999, where he currently lives and works. His artistic development has been influenced by the fact that he graduated from the London School of Economics and that his education was generally oriented towards social and political sciences rather than art. Grospierre’s social inclination is reflected in his early works which dealt with utopian community of refugees. He let his models arrange the frame or decide with whom and against which background they wanted to be photographed.
In his later photo series, Grospierre diverts his attention from the forms of social organization to architecture as a context for human existence. The exploration of architectural motifs has its own special dynamics. Once we study the forms captured by the artist, we notice his interest in modernist socialist architecture. For someone from the outside it may seem that modernism, with its particular aesthetics and architecture, manifested its presence in the former Soviet Union and the countries under its influence in a very unusual and surprising way. It is fully visible in projects such as: Visaginas, Grospierre and Olga Mokrzycka (2003), Hydroklinika, Grospierre (2004) and Artek, Grospierre (2005). Here, Grospierre deepens his photographic way of perceiving things, by fully exploring complex architectural projects, from the façade to the interior. The artist also seems to be interested in a certain vivisection of buildings as forms expressing the ideology of the former system. Grospierre preserves the last moment of existence of these buildings, simultaneously avoiding unnecessary nostalgia. This is an elementary step for documentary photography after Charles Marville and Eugene Atget.
The Hydroclinic was a famous health spa at the Druskininkai resort in Lithuania during the Soviet Union which was demolished later for economic and not ideological reasons.
Further work on documentary projects pushed Grospierre to an attempt at visualizing not a building itself, concrete in its architectural form and material aspect, but the very idea of it. In his later projects, Grospierre returns to his interest in the communist past, and prove his genuine interest in the socialist modernist architecture known for multiple blocks of flats constructed from fabricated elements. Instead of a pure documentary photography, Grospierre has focused on the modernist aesthetics, and presented a large photography project composed of small modules, entitled W-70. The overpowering optical illusion of Grospierre’s work reveals, to some extent, the phantasm of an ideal society that functioned in Utopian Communism, and lived in “Corbusierian” machines-to-live-in.
In the artists’ own words: “The Hydroclinic was situated in the spa town of Druskininkai, in Lithuania and designed by A. and R. Silinskas and built between 1976 and 1981, it used to serve as a balneological hospital, where patients were treated with thermal waters. During the socialist era, Druskininkai was one of the former Soviet Union’s most popular spa towns, and the Hydroclinic was its largest treatment centre. With its 50 healing rooms, 80 thermal baths, 40 mud baths and an underground pool, the centre could host as many as 500 patients at once. With the collapse of the USSR, the number of patients fell dramatically and the hospital was shut down at the end of the 1990s. It remained unused for a few years until it was destroyed in 2005, to be replaced by a modern aqua park, certainly economically more adapted to Lithuania’s needs.
The Hydroklinika project is an attempt at documenting the balneological hospital through a global, objective and systematic approach. Therefore, no part of the building, be it interior or exterior, was neglected and all were uniformly photographed. It is for this reason that a great number of photographs are similar to each other. Indeed, as the hospital was built on a ternary plan, each element is repeated by a multiple of 3.”
Adam Mazur
About Szymon Roginski’s UFO Projekt / By Adam Mazur
SZYMON ROGINSKI – UFO 2006 – 2008
Szymon Rogiński )Born 1975), deals mainly with documentary topographical photography. However, he has enough courage to cross the borderline between this convention into the world of fantasy and imagination. Such courage may result from the fact that apart from his artistic activity, Rogiński works for the media, as one of the top fashion and commercial photographers.
The spectacular futuristic images of his earlier works smoothly change into equally unearthly photographs of his latest cycle UFO (2006-2008), characterized by darkness broken by a characteristic spot light, a starry sky and deserted areas visited by the Aliens. In UFO, we can observe how interested the artist is in the unknown, the freudian category of “unheimlich”, hidden in the technical and objective invention of photography. The unseen and unbelievable, something beyond human perception that can only be believed or otherwise taunted, is revealed. This time again, like with all Rogiński’s documentary works, we ask ourselves – is that all? Only this? What else can we see? What will broaden the horizons of our cognition and experience?
When looking at the UFO photographs, we approach the line between document and fantasy, the border of the representable. Gradually, yet with incredible precision, Rogiński constructs the effect of eeriness. Here, every single detail of a photograph is equally important for the meaning of the whole, and for creating the atmosphere. It is exactly the opposite of what the photographers of séances and paranormal phenomena did a century ago, manipulating technology, making aesthetic use of chemical and optical errors and refraction in order to create incredible images. These days, hardly anyone is impressed with an effect of technology beyond the photographer’s control. Emulsion blur, discoloration and overexposure, as well as simple montage, are nothing unusual in the times of Photoshop. Rogiński’s photographs emanate an unearthly – or even a metaphysical – aura. We know that in the UFO photographs, the effect of eeriness is achieved with the use of technology, but we cannot (or do not want to) resist it. Incredibly realistic and perfectly staged, composed, lit and shot photographs gradually tempt, and sow the seeds of faith in something inexplicable, something far beyond the trivial technicality of the medium. In this aspect, Rogiński’s UFO deals with faith in a reality different from the sensible world. These landscapes are mystical, and their spirituality (rather than sensitivity) is modern. The emptiness of the field visited by the Aliens is evidence of some event that we will never notice until, paradoxically, we believe in this event. In other words, we will not see anything unless weu want to see it.
The series, inspired by the photographer’s assistant who believes in an intelligent form of extraterrestrial life, leads us to questions that are not abstract at all. One could even call them existential. If people can see the Blessed Virgin in a photograph of a window glass or a tree, if we notice John Paul II in the picture of a bonfire, why wouldn’t we see the UFO in Rogiński’s images? Is it possible to live totally devoid of faith in the New Age? It is certainly not easy, but – as Rogiński suggests – we can always trust a photograph. It never lies, does it?
Adam Mazur

NICOLAS GROSPIERRE – HYDROKLINIKA; SZYMON ROGINSKI – PROJEKT UFO, Nicolas Grospierre, Hydroklinika, 2004, lambda print on wood  

NICOLAS GROSPIERRE – HYDROKLINIKA; SZYMON ROGINSKI – PROJEKT UFO, Nicolas Grospierre, Hydroklinika, 2004, lambda print on wood  

NICOLAS GROSPIERRE – HYDROKLINIKA; SZYMON ROGINSKI – PROJEKT UFO, Nicolas Grospierre, Hydroklinika, 2004, lambda print on wood  

NICOLAS GROSPIERRE – HYDROKLINIKA; SZYMON ROGINSKI – PROJEKT UFO, Szymon Roginski, Projekt UFO 07, Epson ink print on Hahnemuehle PhotoRag Pearl paper