The Ruаrts Gallery presents ‘PRTL’, the first solo exhibition by young fine art photographer Alex Partola as part of the ‘Debut’ project. ‘PRTL’ is simultaneously the title of the exhibition, the artist’s nickname, and a reference to the key symbol of this project – the portal. Partola, who works with both analogue and digital photography, creates visual narratives that draw the viewer into another world. His works are not only images of buildings and landscapes, they are also an exploration of transitional states, both physical, from one space to another, and metaphorical.
The exhibition is devised as a visual entrapment, breaking the familiar gallery space. The 19 works featured at the exhibition were created in different years and in different parts of the world: Moscow, St. Petersburg, the Solovetsky Islands, Krasnoyarsk, Berlin, Paris, Hong Kong, Seoul, Tokyo and Bali. The ‘PRTL’ project is a fully-fledged journey where the city is more than just a background, becoming a place where temporal and spatial flows intersect. Inspired by the image of travellers from Kafka’s ‘In the Tunnel’ (published as ‘Railway Passengers’ in Russian), Alex addresses the theme of alienation and existential metamorphosis, where architecture turns into the arena of a quiet but disturbing struggle between the inner world of a human being and the cold impersonality of the metropolis.
Partola sees in architecture something more than just a structure of concrete, glass and steel. For him buildings are the doors to other realities. The central work of the exhibition, ‘You Are in the Matrix – Wake Up’, becomes the key to understanding the author’s concept and makes us think that perhaps our everyday life is merely an illusion and the architecture around us is part of a huge system, a matrix. In many of his works Alex uses the technique of reverse perspective. Playing with the viewer’s perception, he creates a sense of the multidimensionality of space, forcing us to reconsider customary visual codes. In each frame his philosophical reflections on the boundaries between the real and the simulated evoke a reflection of lost ideality, reminding us of the impossibility of full immersion in the matrix of everyday life. Partola’s photographs are a deep internal dialogue, where even without excessive glitch effects and hackneyed cyberpunk clichés there appears a desire to find cracks in the illusory façade of the world.
‘PRTL’ is an exhibition showing that reality is always multi-layered. The photographer invites the viewer to become part of his universe, where each frame is a step into the unknown, where architecture acts as a portal between worlds, and the viewer is a traveller ready to cross this threshold.
