'The Garden of Oblivion' by Victor Stamp
19/11/2012.
Opening. GRC-Mg (Rita Castellote Gallery) [MAD] Spain 22.11.2012 20:00h
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
metalocus, JOSÉ JUAN BARBA
GRC-Mg presents in Madrid “The Garden of Oblivion” the new machiavellian creation by Victor Stamp. A post-photographic exhibition, a representation where Victor´s imaginarium mixes with language and dreams. Creating a fictional world where reality it´s the nearest disillusion.
Double Exposure. 'The Garden of Oblivion' by Victor Stamp.
Ars photographica. 'The Garden of Oblivion' by Victor Stamp.
Clémentine 2012 . Inject print on Hahnemühle art paper. 'The Garden of Oblivion' by Victor Stamp.
The Garden of Oblivion
...mixing
Memory and desire...
—T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land
...ma mémoire précédait ma naissance...
—Patrick Modiano
A Luftwaffe pilot in leather cap with goggles perched on his forehead looks to left of camera in a photo studio in Karlsruhe in September 1941, his gaze directed upwards towards eternity.
A shapely woman wearing headscarf, sunglasses, sweater and tapered slacks stands beside her 1960s Peugeot 404 convertible and enigmatically lifts her right index finger skywards for the benefit of the photographer.
A lissom teenage girl in a dark jersey swimsuit throws her head back in ecstasy, her eyes closed, somewhere on a Baltic beach, sometime in the mid-1940s, seemingly oblivious to the photograph being taken.
Marcel Ducellier—thin lips, bowtie and eyepatch— sentenced to life for delivering confidential information to a foreign power, presents an expressionless face to the police photographer, 29 April 1939. Two children in Berlin in 1943 look on enraptured as their lit sparklers shimmer before their eyes, providing the sole light source for the photograph being taken...
Welcome to the Garden of Oblivion, the inexhaustible planetary archive of forgotten photographic images. Anonymous gelatin silver prints, slides, negatives, glass plates and other analogue sources provide the starting point for the interventions shown in the following pages. Long-forgotten snapshots and run-of-the-mill commercial photography are retrieved from oblivion and transformed by the artifices of digital imaging to tell imaginary stories and set imaginary scenes. The imagery of the contemporary world is rigorously banished: what is shown belongs to a fantasized but plausible past, a fictional retroprojection.
While the entirety of the work is photographically based, photography is used merely as a pretext for what becomes an exercise in post-photography. The artist plays consciously upon photography’s essences and paradoxes: the moment of time frozen into eternity but threatened immediately with forgetfulness and abandon; truth susceptible of being fiction (and vice-versa); the slice of life underwritten by a certain death.
Courator: José Reguera
Dates: 20th November until 18th December 2012
Venue: GRC-Mg (Galería Rita Castellote), calle San Lucas, 9. Madrid. Spain.
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Víctor Stamp
Não sou nada.
Nunca serei nada.
Não posso querer ser nada.
À parte isso, tenho em mim todos os sonhos do mundo.
—Álvaro de Campos, Tabacaria
Victor Stamp first saw the light of day on April 22, 1957, roughly 20,000 kilometres from where it was initially agreed he would see it. By some cosmic equivocation he was born not in Paris or West Berlin but in Cygnet, a picturesque coastal township (population ~900) in the Huon Valley region of southern Tasmania.
Stamp, who once sardonically defined himself as ‘the reprobate child of a presbyopic Presbyterian and a dentist’s daughter’, was haunted from an early age by the dream of a mythical Europe. Against all odds he defied genetic and social determinism, avoided the siren call of dentistry, and proved himself a poet and artist from a tender age: in an interview with Marc Ronceraille he recounts how at age fourteen, while on a trip to Hobart with his parents, he purchased a second-hand copy of the Penguin Poets edition of Mallarmé that changed his life forever. From the outset, however, this infatuation with the glacial infinities of pure poetry collided heavily with the hum and the drum of daily life in a dull little part of the world where, to quote a not-so-recent guidebook, ‘the main attractions include watching the wood-turner at The Deepings make lawn bowls.’
In 1977, after failing to graduate in anything, he set sail for the Old World, never to return. Over the following fifteen years and before devoting himself solely to his artistic activity, his autodidactic genius would stand him in good stead as he embarked upon a variety of enterprises, for all of which he lacked the slightest qualification.
Victor Stamp is convinced that beyond this brief biographical skeleton, the less that is known about him the better. Nevertheless he is willing to divulge that his favourite colour is grey, his favourite metal lead, and his preferred quality in a woman, broad shoulders.
When not planning and executing his modest artistic interventions, he can be found energetically pounding the avenues and boulevards of the great European cities, dissolving his reflection in the shop windows with the mute interrogation of the merchandise, stopping rarely and buying nothing.
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