Leon Bugaev

Scriptphotography
19 December 2019

LEO BUGAEV

Unconventional portraiture. Like the author. And in fact don’t try to call photographer Leo Bugaev or, least of all, portraitist: the young Russian is a multimedia artist to whom any definition is tight. But we talk about portraits here but from an oblique point of view that, before falling into the arms of a definition, needs a deeper look. If in traditional portraiture there are many authors who agree on the point that the true subject is the author himself and not the person in front of the lens, Leo Bugaev pushes the terms of the debate further, in the conceptual space where the portrait meets functional symbolism to a formal design, style and content. In fact, reversing the principle according to which the centrality of the portrait must be occupied by the «body» or parts of it (face, eyes, etc.), in Bugaev's photographs it is hidden in a secondary plane and whose physical structure is a scaffolding in which the «object» is significant with respect to the subject. More than portraits we should talk about allegorical still life in which a globe becomes a metaphysical metaphor, while in others the symbols of consumption used for images offer us a clearer interpretation. And more precise, in which the metaphor turns towards social criticism. In this regard, look at the images in which a television has taken the place of the head of a man or, worse, the couple guarding another empty television set, however, like the fixity of their posture and looks. We are, Bugaev seems to say, what we are and what we are does not always coincide with what we believe to be. The objects represent us, they talk about us and for us, they govern us without offering any resistance. They are us. And without us we are nobody. Unpresentable. And in fact the expressive «summa» resides in the portrait of the woman's shoulders: without objects, placed on a plane, it’s devoid of any subjectivity, naked, useless. The objects, as we have seen, predominate and are emblematic of photography in which the human figure no longer exists, is absent while objects remain, as subjects of a «trans human» expressiveness. Their focal staticity prevails over the movement of figures that in some images seem like crazy, prey of a frenetic movement, victims of an indomitable «blur»: fixed points while everything around is changeable and predisposed to kinetic vertigo, uncontrollable as irrational. And to us, as we look at Leo Bugaev's photographs, it raises the awareness of drowning in a time when time has already passed. Unseizably.

Giuseppe Cicozzetti, Italian Art Critic