Water Reflections

Curatorial Statement

Ivan Mikolji: Water Reflections

Ivan Mikolji mutates water reflections into unusual images, thanks to his expertise in using the reflection of light when it goes through the surface of the water; submerged in rivers and seas, camera in hand, he abstracts from time until he finds the angle that reflects the compositions he seeks to confront the public with the photography as art.

Thus, the aqueous soils of The Great Savanna become compositions that transform nature into concentric, triangular, and mandala shapes, which transmit a halo of mystery to the ecosystems of the Guiana Shield, unique on the planet, and on which the balance and harmony of the existence of humanity depend on, since it generates 25% of freshwater of the planet and it is also one of the largest lungs on the planet.

In these reflections, photography distances itself from documentary reality and enters the Edenic quest to generate knowledge and provoke a conservationist praxis in people, when evidencing the fragility of these biomes through aesthetics.

These compositions are transformed into visual metaphors, dominated by the artist’s creative passion, by concentrating and focusing on the physical compartment of light and turning its waves into mirrors. The artist turns the aquatic universe into poetry, through a visual language that transforms photography closer to surrealism and abstract expressionism.

When these biomes are not affected by deforestation and pollution, the transparency of the water allows sunbeams to penetrate the flooded savannas of the forests and plains, where there is an abundance of fish such as peacock bass or shoals of piranhas. These surfaces covered with cloaks of leaves and branches become heaven. These photographs remind the macroscopic structure of matter and create a visual reality dominated by duplicity and seriality.

Branches and leaves change their shape in the flooded palm groves when they are carried by currents of channels and rivers. The artist changes this reality through his visual language by creating imaginary visions that acquire kaleidoscopic atmospheres when are clicked. This proposal is not trapped in beauty itself, but in beauty as a creator of empathy towards the blue planet.

These images are not the result of good luck; they are the result of conscious creation, planning each composition, so that it assumes multiple meanings, such as the pictures of leaves whose reflections transform them into a receptacle, among the silent stillness of the riverside background. It seems as if a mysterious darkness emerges from them; giving the public freedom of imagination on the formal and symbolic meanings that these metaphors of Pandora’s box could have.  It’s a cosmos that materializes with water as the protagonist of each of these images.

Eduardo Planchart Licea
PhD Latin American Art History, UNAM