"The art of Roger Ballen is impossible to forget. It goes deep. Gets at places we didn’t know were there. Maybe hoped weren't there. It makes us wild. It opens us up to those uncertain, shocking and frighteningly banal aspects of the waking dream, twitching between animal and human, the clean and the unclean, the animate and the inanimate, the lived and the imagined, the natural and the performed. Arguably, the dynamic is this: Ballen’s complex artistic vision transforms particular historical and social issues into private, felt, internally experienced matters." (http://www.rogerballen.com/, Introduction) I LOVE HIM.
And with an eye for twisted sorts of smirking surrealism like his, who wouldn't be enamored? There is a dark humor present in his images that evokes the most enigmatic of emotions (though my experiences consist solely of anomalous ones). Many many many can be felt, I assure you.
The rhapsodical effluence of Ballen's work lies in all the seemingly minute details of each singular shot. This is, in my opinion, where the substance of the concentrations are found. There's dirty people in bizarre places doing bizarre things and one might take a hasty look and think "what a kook!", but there is much more to his prints than eccentricity. His shots look spontaneous, an aspect I absolutely adore in artwork. The prints are not posed but the composition of the shots remain impeccable. The nucleus of Ballen's photos is a consistent calmness uniformly existent in a sangfroid cynicism. It leaves one uneasy and in a state of quandary, but more so than anything, in a state of awe. He really gets my aesthetic-craving blood a-pumpin'.
And oh my! He's presently working on a new project that I am exceedingly enthusiastic about.
Visit his site to check ot out:
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