Involuntary Perception by Béla Selendy
Nature’s Core Photography Exhibition
Souterrain Gallery, West Cornwall CT
By Kathleen Hulser
Béla Selendy is perplexed and riveted by the processes which vitalize all life and yet remain mysterious and inchoate. In Nature’s Core, light is always a portal to the unknown. The artist refers to “involuntary perception,” a notion that embodies the challenge of work that focuses our attention on the unseen. Using his camera, his acute sensibility studies the visible to uncover essences. The internal qualities of objects speak: you feel growth pushing flora, the world flowing through wildlife and self.
In the image “Artichoke” the purple light tinting the adolescent spines of an artichoke tracks becoming, the way in which a seed holds within itself a future iteration as a fully developed plant. Selendy himself channels this haunting evolution with the following characterization: “The feral thistle’s questing spines beseech.” Flora are animate forms, even as the photograph freezes a moment. The artist knows how to freeze a moment, as seen with his hummingbird series of exquisite creatures in flight on acid green. Yet even that stillness evokes the restless motion of the natural world.
The series titled “Canvas” penetrates to the core of things by literally studying surfaces of copper plating, inverting colors in photoshop processing of the images printed on canvas. While photography mostly speaks about the 2D surface, Selendy shows us how color comes from within these weathered tiles, not as a surface hue but a ubiquitous eternally renewed element. Copper’s many colors play out over a process of rusting, creating hues and patterns that evoke a deep mineral past. Selendy alludes to this saying, “miles below a surface scarred remnant myths of an earth resplendent.”
Delectable puzzles of quantum mechanics inhabit the “Absence of One” set of photographs, posing questions about light. The images consist of geometric elements assembled in complex layers that each have varied lights and shadows created by a flashlight shone from different angles. Selendy suggests how subatomic action is riddled with paradox, thereby making what we think we see a phantom of our projections. Quantum mechanics explores energy exchange between electron and photon, suggesting that the behavior of matter and light is fundamentally uncertain, since it changes when under observation. In Selendy’s series you might say that “no angle is the right angle when light emanates from so many sources.” This approach resonates with the infinitely curious abstract photography of BauHaus pioneer László Moholy-Nagy in the 1930s.
In the “Landscape” series, rocky outcrops appear in curling waves, as though beautifully sculpted by glaciers. The images shot in extreme close- up turn out to be peeling white clapboards topped with verdigris. This playful presentation evokes one of my favorite perception warnings: “Objects in rear view mirror may be closer than they appear.” Indeed, reality may be closer than it appears.
Selendy’s work refutes our assumptions about recorded realities, insisting that we go further than our ordinary relationships to the visible world. Penetrating to the unsaid and unseen, he draws our attention to how realities are created and just as swiftly decay. What light etches at Nature’s Core may always be a fugitive from our explanations.