The Anonymous Inflorescence
Matei Bejenaru’s photography series Models

Odd life grows under our feet and overseas, impatient to merely exist, no matter our human obsession with observation and experimentation. How much does our understanding of the mechanisms of the environment around us leads to a more profound connection to our world, and how much of it excuses further exploitation and destruction?

In the following paragraphs, I will explore the roots and references in the history of photography related to the series [Models] Modele of Matei Bejenaru, part of the artist’s most recent works and exhibitions, building further connections to theories on post-photographic images and contemporary analogue photography. Having worked closely with the artist as a curator for the production and subsequent exhibition of Models in Bucharest at Anca Poterasu Gallery in 2022, I will further expand on some of the ideas that materialized in the show.

What does the camera see?

Through close-up photographs of bodies of flowers, vegetal and cellular structures, Matei Bejenaru takes on a poetical approach on the science of discoveries and the art of representation. At its core, the series Models investigates the rapport we maintain with our surrounding reality. What can the camera lens add and subtract from the spaces near and far? In the current context of climate change and ecological disasters, the seductive petals, colors, and depth of the artist’s images turn our gaze towards the frail balance between aesthetics and the information contained within, between the object of our admiration and the subject of its own physiology.

The more we look at these images, the more we can distinguish fine cracks in the structure of the flowers, discrete supporting elements, and wires, disclosing the fact that we are in fact observing photographic reproductions of sculptural models of plants, and not of the plants themselves. Made of papier mâché, clay and ceramics, these miniatures are highly skilled handcrafted artworks, albeit functional instruments for the study of Botany. The artist first encountered them in 2019, part of his ongoing research and interest for the discarded spaces of knowledge in post-communist Romania in the series Between Two Worlds (disjointed from Models as this text will further argue). Imported in Romania from the German Democratic Republic in the 1970s and 1980s, the plant models are not much taller than 7-10 cm in height. Historically, these models have been widely distributed in universities throughout Europe since the 19th century[1] as natural samples had a limited lifespan and microscopes had been far more expensive at the time. The small-sized, sometimes modular sculptures allow for a careful observation and deconstruction of the flower and vegetal apparatus, from the stem, towards sepals, stamina, and pistil, alongside the floral axis.

Enlarging the sculptural models through macro-photography in careful close-ups worked on film, Matei Bejenaru crosses through the discursive spaces of the medium, differentiated by Rosalind Krauss from representation to presentation, from the double of a reality to a plane of pure visuality[2]. Bejenaru’s long-term commitment to analogue photography and its language demonstrate his appetite for conceptual connections between image, subjectivity, and documentary work, but this series in particular is set on creating fictions that reveal their constructs on layers of double mirroring: the representation of a representation of the real.

The artist tests the limits of analogue photography to guide our gaze along the textures and shapes through selected areas of focus and sharpness. Where the round of buds and petals slowly fade into the background, the image translates a three-dimensional alure onto its surface. The larger the images are printed, the more these details overwhelm the viewer, creating abstract landscapes on the edge of a petal, or animating the flower into a choreographed dance. Matei Bejenaru’s exhibition[3] featured two such large-sized photographs (of approximately 190 x 250 cm in height and width) virtually becoming environments in themselves, emanating a strange physical force that would otherwise contrast with the much gentler symbolism usually attributed to flowers. The images attain the sculptural force previously seen in the works of Edward Weston, or Imogen Cunningham. The large-format photographs Model_01 and Model_02 effectively pull us near, seducing us, drawing us in the rhythmicity and plasticity of the detail, as our mind decides whether what we see is a depiction of a real plant or a phantasmagorical, even digitally-created, or painted creature. There is depth created by the limitations of analogue photography and its allure pertaining to the inexact soft focus of the images, where the bulbous, rounded areas of the flowers are given depth and movement. The occurring landscapes on the large-format images are more and more painterly, with diffuse backgrounds and set-scenes of valleys and flowing textures.

The analogue in the digital realm

It is perhaps not surprising that the artist considers this series at a time when augmented, digital, meta – realities emerge more and more as new territories to explore. As much as the photographs and display pay tribute to tableau photography and still-life historical representations, Models connects to a more conceptual contemporary discourse that reconsiders the role of photography in a hyper-mediated image world, such as Linda Zhengová’s own work on still-life portraits of flowers in the striking series Showering with Glasses (2018)[4].

If we look back into the history of photography in relation to Models, Karl Blossfeldt’s botanical series are the closest and most famous visual reference. His Art Forms in Nature, first published in 1929, gained wide recognition, especially for the skillfully detailed and unprecedented photographic magnifications of botanical imagery. The historical works have captured at the time the attention of both the supporters of New Objectivity as well as the imagination of the surrealist avantgarde. Blossfeldt’s life-time work was at various moments, the apex of apparent un-mediated images of nature, conforming to human-sized worlds of science and architecture, as well as symbolic representations of mere fallacy & fantasy, as underlined in the text of Georges Bataille’s essay “The Language of Flowers”[5] in the journal Documents which featured a selection of Blossfeldt’s close-ups. Walter Benjamin, an admirer of Blossfeldt’s images himself, pointed out how  photography is that exact technology through which unreal elements can be inserted, created by the difference in the relationship between nature perceived by the eye and nature perceived by the camera lens.[6] In this instance, Matei Bejenaru’s carnal, almost erotic, but equally alien-looking flowers, are far more organic, alive and expansive than Blossfeldt’s architectural and mathematical aesthetics, although similar enough on the theme of study plant photography. So what is it that his camera lens particularly unveils?

Looking through the spaces that the centre cannot hold

Bejenaru’s Models works are neither portraits of humanity’s creative force, nor mere instruments of anthropomorphizing of any kind. The grand scale of the larger prints conjures images of flowers overtaking the conversation entirely, laying under the magnifying lens our own obsession with dissecting, discovering, appropriating, and transforming nature in our own image, rather than making use of their supposed biological and scientific aura.  Matei Bejenaru photographs the papier mâché plants as the fiction-fuel that they are, apparently arguing for no science devoid of humanism, nor any art devoid of scientific thought, which in the latest Bucharest exhibition was expressed through the merging of a photographic lab together with a botanical study-room.

The emergence of physical laboratories in the exhibition is motivated by the long-term practice of Matei Bejenaru, with a documentary photography series depicting remnants of technological sites, museums and institutions across Romania, largely archived under the title Between Two Worlds. Vestiges of an ideological discourse on science, valuable collections and books, have since been forgotten or hidden from public view as the artist strives to document them before complete disappearance. His preference for analogue images towards the ever-growing archive is not accidental: the science of film-photography reached its peak around the same period these museums and technological sites were being opened and promoted to larger audiences, thus the artistic intent on creating a conceptual connection with the subject, especially in our post-digital present, emptied of so many lost physical bodies of libraries and scientific institutions.

Models, set apart from Between Two Worlds, is a series in its own space-time pocket, purposefully anonymized from its context. Unlike the documentary work in previous series, Matei Bejenaru provides no information or classification of the depicted plants. Titles follow simple rules of silent inventory: Models_01, 02 and so on. The absence of labels and other measurable scientific or documentary data enables a tension between the viewer and the image – there is an ongoing unknown, no matter how much is said or retrieved from the visual information.  Through this glass-tight series, Matei Bejenaru builds on the historical discourse on photography, on the aura of the original and on image appropriation through an interplay of mediated worlds that can reveal more on the relation between artist – camera – viewer – image – artist – camera and the imaginative fictions that feed into reality. Operating in these liminal spaces between approximations and the mysterious Other, between representation, translation and the possibility of understanding, Models appeals to the human eye with its non-human strangeness.

– by Cristina Stoenescu

[1] Fiorini, G., Maekawa, L., & Stiberc, P. (2008). Save the plants: conservation of Brendel anatomical botany models.

[2] Krauss, R.E. (2000). A Voyage on the North Sea: Art in the Age of the Post-Medium Condition.

[3] Modele, solo exhibition Matei Bejenaru curated by the author of this text at Anca Poterasu Gallery, 15.11 – 15.12.2022 in Bucharest

[4]  Although Zhengová’s powerful artistic statement explores another theme, that of photography in relation to the Czech LGBTQI+ art scene and politics, her statement pertinently underlines the possibilities that photography opens up as a ”suitable medium to challenge the society of control through its aesthetics which aims for the contestation of the viewer by inviting a non-binary gaze and a post-human imagining of ourselves” in: Photography: A Facilitator Of A Czech Queer Utopia? by Linda Zhengová, Kajet Digital consulted on 12.11.2022 Linda Zhengová | Photography: A Facilitator Of A Czech Queer Utopia? – Kajet Digital : Kajet Digital (Kajetjournal.Com)

[5]  Bataille, G., Stoekl, A., Lovitt, C.R., & Leslie, D.M. (1985). Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939.

[6] Benjamin, Walter,“The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, Third Version,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2003), p. 266.