Alexander Gronsky - [02-24-2022] Moscow suburbs - 2022

Sold out at the publisher, out of Print.
Strongly limited to 450.

New, Still originally wrapped in publisher's paper;
PERFECT!

In this splendid and rare book [02-24-2022] as in Pastoral, Alexander Gronsky captures the Moscow Suburbs, the intermediate zone that exists between the metropolis - the Russian capital Moscow - and nature, which has already disappeared. It is neither city nor countryside. It is a series of views of the suburbs, often taken from afar: from desolate and uncultivated lands, from landfills, from the no man's land that surrounds the city. The landscape tends to remain separated from the observer, hindering his entry. The fact that the scene remains so distant is often linked to its ability to show the viewer an aesthetic completeness that is complete in itself, to have its own form.

The artist carefully chooses the point of view, balances the composition, meticulously calculates every detail and shrewdly harmonizes the range of colors, trying to avoid superfluous chromatic contrasts that would not integrate well with everything else. There is nothing random or improvised in these images. Things may be ugly and shapeless, but the scenes, in terms of classical aesthetics, are extremely beautiful. In Gronsky's views both the time of day and the historical phase are undefined. The desolation of the spaces marks this indefiniteness. If life sprouts here, outside the city, why are the buildings so empty, as if the population has already abandoned them? Is it an end or a beginning?

The cold perfection of his work would seem to suggest a similar vision of the world by Gronsky, especially since the people in his photographs are tiny figures that emerge with difficulty from the landscape, without any independent relevance. This "subtraction of the human", the evanescence of the subject, the anonymity of vision are linked to the disappearance of the "object", to the loss of an intentional orientation of the gaze. And herein lies the paradox of Gronsky's photographs. By eliminating the objects, the vision spontaneously and in an exceptionally intense way enters into a relationship with the world in all its indefiniteness and fullness. The work consists of a series of fascinating views in which there is practically nothing to look at. Despite their illusory concreteness, Gronsky's photographs fall far more into the plane of pure vision, of the apparition, than into that of the materiality of the objects presented. And in this lies their undoubted contemporaneity and strength.

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