Photography’s Escape from Itself – Mihai Plătică
If we look at the three exhibitions by Mihai Plătică until now, we can see he is an artist preoccupied with origins. Starting from the human body, he explores the universe with its beginnings, always returning to earthly nature, sometimes looked at through the nonhuman retina of a primitive digital camera. Mihai Plătică is a photographer who plans his exhibitions sculpturally. He is passionate about the object of photography and the performative quality of his photographs. He has mastered a certain visual language, proportions, colors, and materials, with which he plays and explores the observable reality in fundamental ways.
In 2006 he graduated from the Photo-Video department at UAD Cluj, but his debut was only in 2016, with the exhibition Wide Open Skin, at Baril, a gallery that he would further collaborate with in the following years. The exhibition had at its core the notion of bodily techniques, the variability of gestures as responses to the environment. There were references to judo (the Yves Klein quote: Judo is, in fact, the discovery by the human body of a spiritual place, his book on judo) and athletics, acupuncture (the artist’s face, framed and touched by needles), body care, space travel, acne, yoga, surgery, and mud baths. It is a series of “bodies emptied of context,” with the occasional landscape in-between. This first exhibition is also the start of the artist’s play with various objects, which would repeat in future exhibitions. We see experiments with frames, starting from a desire to present the works like artifacts in display cases: the landscape presented as a precious object, covering only half of what the frame’s perimeter would allow, a contrasting dialogue with the other half, which is completely covered in wood. There are frames that become thicker towards the bottom, or in diagonal, in tandem with the subject, an interior pool, as if the frame were under the effect of gravity, an important element for the artist. Another playful example is the photo of the yogi placed in a case stuck to the wall, which can only be seen if you sit down parallel to him. On a cupboard are petri dishes filled with kinetic sand and figurines lying on the beach, and on another, Georges Vigarello’s history of hygiene, Le propre et le sale – l’hygiène du corps depuis le Moyen Âge et de la santé, sits sterilized. The book is connected to a series of small portraits the artist made of models that he asked to wash themselves before posing, to capture their steamy skin after a bath. Another element we see in this exhibition for the first time are balls, here marked with an E for energy, and the javelin, a reference to the intransigence of physical laws acting on the human body but also to the artist’s former sports career. The javelin, which is white this time, inscribed with Sic itur ad astra, confirms that we are speaking about the human body; it would appear in Plătică’s next shows as a marker of the subject. In fact, Plătică’s exhibition borrows something from Klein’s quote and places the human body into a spiritual space.
In 2019, also at Baril, Plătică continued with Pillars of Creation, named after the Hubble photo, which was reinterpreted for the exhibition – the downloaded and printed photo is covered in green Chroma Key paint, layers that can be seen with x-rays. The exhibition compresses two and a half years of interest in NASA research. The green “painting” is associated with an aluminum plate with stripes whose distance from each other is determined by the material’s density. There is another piece of aluminum with the same shape that becomes thicker in a diagonal, same as the frame with the pool from the previous exhibition, a reference to the importance of gravity in Plătică’s thought. Among the photos of stars there is an intuitive map of the cosmos represented by a heptahedron made of colored resin and storage lockers with food for astronauts on a spaceship. It is an exhibition that, starting from the cosmos, explores the terrestrial landscape of the Aegean Sea, in colored formulas in which one can notice trees, the sea, the rocks, the sky seen from the observatory, all of them subordinate to the sun’s light, whose power is marked by a neon sign that reads “3,828 x 1026 W.” The exploration of color is central to the exhibition, from the frame around a moon landscape, with the same green that covers the “Pillars of Creation,” to the colored hurdles in a degradé communicating with the line of the horizon found in other works by the artist and the rainbow-covered javelin. The frames used by Plătică, made at 45 Fine Framing, glorifyingthe landscapes and acquiring performative qualities. When the frame is a box covering the image frontally, one is forced to view the night landscape with cactuses from the side. Another example is the box-frame with a photo of clouds and a piece of aerogel, the lightest solid material, which can be up to 98% air, or the two photos with a foggy sea and the horizon, of which the first is visible in full while the second is completely covered by the frame, except for the horizon.
But his most ample exhibition is Alpher-Bethe-Gamow in 2021, at Gaep Gallery in Bucharest. The title starts from the 1948 science text The Origin of Chemical Elements, an account of how chemical elements formed shortly after the Big Bang, how some neutrons became electrons and others protons and how through the consecutive addition of particles chemical elements emerged. The work has its limitations and only gives a correct explanation of hydrogen and helium, which form about 99% of the universe. One thing that interested the artist was the pun αβγ of its authors’ names, being written by physicist Ralph Alpher, supervised by George Gamow, and, at the latter’s playful initiative, reviewed by physicist Hans Bethe. Alpher-Bethe-Gamow is explicitly present within the exhibition through a framed photocopy and a neon sign with the three Greek letters at the end of the exhibition. Ylem is a wooden heptahedron with the same shape as the “cosmic map” at Baril, which contains a capsule of hydrogen and one of helium and bears the Greek-inspired name given by Alpher and Gamow to the primordial particle soup. Plătică associates various elements from the periodic table, continuing to use the frames in which the photo takes up only half of the exhibition surface, only this time, in the space in which one could previously enjoy a fibrous texture, there is a sample of a chemical element, such as a sheet of oxidized vanadium, tritium isotopes, anodized niobium, and 99,9% niobium that are chromatically associated with a landscape, in the artist’s series Combining Landscape Elements. Similar in shape to the frames is also a piece of wood in which germanium telescope lenses are embedded creating the map of the Pleiades. Another element, continuing a thread from the previous exhibition, is the aluminum block that takes the shape of a miniature acoustic mirror, a precursor of the radar. The javelin is also present, this time painted in Black 3.0, the darkest shade of black, which absorbs 99% of light. Black 3.0 was created as a response to British artist Anish Kapoor’s monopoly over a different shade of black that also absorbs 99% of light, Vantablack. In order for Black 3.0 to be used, the buyer must declare that they are not, nor will they give the paint to, Anish Kapoor. The alternation between the terrestrial landscape and references to the cosmos continue with the Carpathian landscapes captured on hikes or from the plane with old digital cameras such as the Sony Mavica, 1998, 0.3 mp, stored on floppy disk (zoomed-in images that can only be made sense of from a distance), and the way he captures the lights at the Turda salt mine as if they were stardust, the movements of cosmic bodies, far from our planet and far from the human.
Starting from the ability of photography to represent the complexity of reality, the artist manipulates the RGB model and perspective in his series Radiant Landscape and Chromatic Waves, in which monotone landscapes and the sea’s waves are a pretext to reflect on models for analyzing the matter that photography has at its disposal. The balls in the first exhibition appear here again, this time as bowls balls, representing four planets with different orbits. Placed on a plane locker, a silicon block is a reference to the possibilities of other forms of life, as the element is seen by Carl Sagan as an alternative to carbon, with which it shares some properties and which it immediately follows on the periodic table. Throughout the exhibition there are Greek landscapes, of which the most remarkable is , in which golden light is reflected, strongly and confusingly, onto the tree’s crown, or the vernacular Recombination, which captures the disordered circulation of chemical elements in the world, like a metaphor of cosmological recombination. At the end of the exhibition, three columns stand tall, making use of photography’s object quality, as they are composed of nocturnal landscapes with rocky, barren terrain.
In his art, Mihai Plătică alternates photography with the object and photography as object, he explores the limits of color and representationality. Through the way he conceives his exhibitions, under the influence of scientific methods, his art reaches a spiritual, almost pantheistic dimension.
– by Bogdan Bălan
