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Erick Ifergan
Ifergan, who is famous for his hyperreal short-film and advertising work, uses a similar style of lighting in his photos of Los Angeles at night. The exhibition at Winzavod runs until April 23.
The Moroccan-born, France-raised Ifergan's work in short films, commercials and music videos incorporates a hyperreal style of lighting and focus. "American Night," which will show at the Transatlantique Gallery until April 23, displays the same attention to super-saturated color schemes and spatial balance that Ifergan utilizes in his film projects, but the subject matter is quite different. All the photographs were taken at night in the depths of Los Angeles, and the results are quite engrossing, if not occasionally bizarre.
A lithe, shirtless man stands in an empty parking lot, his hands tucked into his pockets, his shoulders squared as he stares at the camera. A large woman in a leopard-print dress lies, asleep or unconscious, on a bus stop bench, her body framed by the end of an idling bus and the side of the bus stop. At a car wash, a man prepares to rinse off a soapy vehicle under the harsh green tint of fluorescent lighting. An elderly man stares into the camera, a burning cigarette dangling from his mouth as the city around him seems to vibrate and blur into an unrecognizable mix of smeared light. Inside a laundromat, an army of washing machines sit sentient, their lids open in a strange salute to the lone human inhabitant perched by the window.
Such inertia is different for Ifergan, whose commercial work for Dior, AT&T, Nintendo and anti-smoking aid Commit incorporates bombastic, silly situations, like a Japanese-speaking Trojan horse rolling through an airport or an army of cigarettes crawling all over a recently quit smoker. "Johnny 316," his 2006 feature-length adaptation of Oscar Wilde's play "Salome," starred quirky American director and musician Vincent Gallo as a white-suited holy man in Hollywood captured by Ifergan in numerous close-ups (and allegorical shots in which he floats over the highway).
In "American Night," the simplicity and careful framing of each shot gives Ifergan the opportunity to exploit the different aspects of unnatural light that can be found at night in a metropolis like Los Angeles. And while his director's eye for composition makes many of the images look like hybrids of paint and celluloid gloss, much like Gerhard Richter's photorealism, it's the stark, drab nature of his subjects in "American Night" that lend authenticity to the works.
"American Night" runs until April 23 at Transatlantique Gallery in the Winzavod complex, located at 1 4th Syromyatnichesky Pereulok, stroenye 6. Metro Kurskaya, Chkalovskaya. 223-4631.
