Andre Cortes exhibit continues in Lviv
When you finally arrive at the Cortes exhibit, getting out of a packed fixed route taxi, clutching your mobile phone in your sweaty hand, afraid to be late for yet another appointment, you at first feel nervous. You suddenly find yourself snatched from the insane hustle and bustle of today’s life and tossed in a different world, the way a brat hurls a kitten in a pond. You are frightened; you are disoriented in this strange other world. You walk past the canvases on the walls (canvases because describing them as photographs would be a strong understatement, I think), then suddenly you discover that your breathing is returning to normal. You finally recall having your heart somewhere there. Your heart aches the way you feel finally returning home, returning to your true self, without hypocrisy, with no frills.
It appears that one can photograph an ordinary stone, boulder, wheel, even half of a wheel, instill in the picture life itself, and fill it with a philosophy of its own. An obscure street, a number of plain chairs, a stairway... These are outwardly insignificant details, trifles. Nothing to match the captivating colors of sunset, the heady rhythm of a waterfall, or the breathtaking burial site of Agamemnon at Mycenae... Yet there was something about those pictures that makes me stop in my tracks. But things like that happen when one encounters genuine works of art.
The French are right to feel such respect for Andre Cortes. The man was born in Budapest, died in the United States, and dedicated only a part of his life to Paris. Yet, he would return to France for the rest of his life and bequeathed all of his photographs to that country, he loved France so! That the Lviv public could see 163 of his pictures was a rare and most fortunate occasion bestowed by a monthly about the French spring in Ukraine. Incidentally, in recent years, the exhibit has not been allowed out of the boundaries of France, and Ukrainian art photographers have known about Cortes only fleetingly. This means that now they have had an exceptionally rare opportunity to see one of their own, a renowned classic at that, in full creative splendor, and for this reason people came to Lviv from other cities and towns. However, people of various ages and occupations gather in front of his pictures at Lviv’s Palace of Art. They stand in front of them for quite some time, because rushing through exhibition halls, stopping briefly in front of some pictures is what you do at a regular art exhibit. In this case, it is a story about Paris, hence the display title Paris in the Format of the Heart. In fact, the title is borrowed from the heading of Armand Lanu’s article, and his feature and Cortes’s photo story match each other, being in the same format of the heart.
A physically handicapped vendor selling anemones, cafes open early in the morning, an aging professor crossing a street, and of course, Paris bridges, the Eiffel Tower, rounded off by faces of the artist’s friends and colleagues. And women, many of them. Seldom portrayed young, considering what Georges Simenon, a renowned expert on the fair sex, had to say on the subject. He wrote that a Parisienne more often than not does not possess the splendor of her initial youth; rather, she has that refined and deeper-reaching glamour of the Balzac age; wherever she comes from, the lowest or the highest strata, she must receive a certain kind of education. It would be indiscreet and against the rules to ask her where she had received that education. In any case, the important thing is that she has reached maturity, she can see through every man; she knows all there is to know about people; she has learned enough not to be surprised or angered by anything any longer; she is a good listener, following your story with a knowing smile. How well said!
Cortes has other women in his pictures — faceless, their naked bodies reflected in distorting mirrors (as in his well-known Distortions series). One might assume that this is the artist’s tribute to creative experimentation. Another possibility is that he saw some women for what they actually were. These pictures also gladden the eye of whomever knows enough to tell real mastery at first sight.
