Eduard Semenovich Gorokhovsky, 1929-2004

The human being is the focal theme of Eduard Gorokhovsky's work. Like the American photo realist Chuck Close, he pre-eminently resorts to photographic portraits using either daguerreotypes of the nineteenth and early twentieth century or photographs taken by the artist himself. The main artistic method consists of presenting the viewer not with an integrated, resolved, whole image but with an image that is divided, consisting of two unconnected pictures.

 ''My pictures almost always consist of two elements, the first of which is photography, reproduced by some kind of method. The second element is something which intrudes upon the photographic space. It can be anything, a geometric figure, silhouette, text or another photograph.''

In The Brick Gorokhovsky uses a group portrait of pre-revolutionary military dignities and superimposes the international No Entry traffic sign against a background of sky and branches of trees.

The superimposed image intrudes into the depth of the photograph and increases the flatness of the picture. Continually interfering with one's perception of the photographic object, the No Entry sign forces the viewer to shift his focus when viewing the picture. The viewer finds himself with a choice: whether to look deep into the photograph, or whether to accept the picture as a new plastic reality. This choice is freedom which encourages the viewer to think, contemplate, imagine and interpret.