You see places in Orith Youdovich’s photos. But they are just an excuse: they are on paper to reflect other distant, unconventional and dramatically invisible representations. «That’s how this place appeared to me when I found myself there – says the artist – and that’s how I felt when it found itself in front of me». But how they were in the precise instant of their meeting it’s only the beginning. The visible appearance of every element has its value only in the twinkling of the eye: fast as the run of the existence, but dilated in the fixity of a photogram. Although the expansion of a moment given by photography is prodigious, it can’t solve the dilemma of how to domesticate time: the delight felt by the observer is every time dangerously similar and close to the shiver of a vertigo, the same feeling that we can get in a room standing between two facing mirrors.

In Orith Youdovich’s artistic process, the choice seems to move from a sort of fluid unconsciousness: the relation between the artist and the represented object is even. The initial splitting means to find each other without seeking. She never creates a series of photographs by planning in advance, nor does she use to catalogue the results by giving them titles and captions. She rather senses: she is dazzled by the unexpected anonymity of peripheral streets, by the vagueness of desert beaches, by the void of forgotten or ignored spaces. Only when the urge of a sensorial love drives her to the top of a reciprocal gaze, she moves into action. Do not shoot until the scene is safe from the snare of hackneyed mannered superstructures, that’s the key rule of her own self-control discipline that she hardly loses. The invisible representations caused by mainly monochrome lines, are just hypothesis of the subconscious on the mutations of the form that arise – backwards and forwards – since the first favorite instant. The outward appearance posed as concept is visionary energy that dispels any sterile presumption of coherence. Every place and every state of mind are never the same: with time they can eventually meet, as an unexpected revelation of elective affinity. Orith Youdovich makes us think about this, as only an authentic and very subtle artist can do: speaking of herself, but in the name of everyone.

© Carlo Gallerati – December 2010
Catalogue of the exhibition 06. FUORI 4, pp. 23-24