Born in 1953 in Blasendorf (RO)
Lives and works in Cologne (DE)
1989
5 black and white photographs series, gelatin-silver prints
37.5 x 28 cm chacune
Year of Purchase: 1991
The Visages (Faces) series shows a sequence of ghostlike portraits of the artist. Bonfert records the disappearance of his image, his features blurred by imprecise traces of light imprinted on the salient masses of the face. The eyes, the only concave features retaining the light, seem to refuse any incarnation. Like mirrors of the soul capable of asserting presence, in the religious sense of the word, they nevertheless remain blind and absent, kinds of vanished symbols of the personality.
To make his photographs, the artist must put up with long poses in half-light beneath a spot, so as to merge his body in the light, which causes a sensation of movements rubbed on the image’s surface. This effective contradiction between the demands of the process and the result works against the idea of a veracity of the split second recorded by the photograph. By using the medium’s capacity to create illusion, Bonfert renders visible the ‘veil’ of appearance, the trace left by the passage of what exists, the shadow of a memory that refuses to be fixed. He thus depicts this impossible definition of the face enclosed in an enigmatic image of the man tortured by his presence in the world.
This work on the body is similar to the questioning about the face, in the 1960s the other and its representation came back to haunt the surface of the works with, at the centre, the image of the artist. In German art, with the Viennese Actionists, Dieter Appelt, Arnulf Rainer, Roman Opalka… and Gerd Bonfert, this obsessive image is marked by the quest for an ever inaccessible identity, an existential reason full of doubt and refusal, plunging to the depths of the marks left by history.
Haunted by the dissolution of bodies, by the transparency of light which, through excess, destroys the usual appearance of things (Silex and Parpaings – Breeze-Block – series) and beings, Bonfert’s photographs present weightless bodies evolving in the intracacies of another reality. They evoke the fading of the human face incapable of describing and depicting itself, and its death as an identifiable form of the real.
Maïté Vissault