As a lover of both art forms, I always find it a thing of particular beauty when a photographer can blur the lines between their work and physical painting. An artist whose visual poetry blends those seamlessly is Venezuelan born Samantha Cavet. This piece, dubbed The immortality of dreams from her ‘stories’ series, is steeped in mystery and melancholy. It’s protagonist, a faceless, hat-wearing stranger draped in a dark overcoat, recalls Magritte’s bowler hatted principal characters. The mix of the orange-tinted field at his (or her) feet, the dramatic, dark blue cloudscape above and the slightly soft focus/hazy texture really deliver that painterly, almost post-impressionistic feel.
The landscape becomes as much a character as the solitary, central figure, picked without a doubt out of some not-too-distant daydream of the artist. Samantha’s process aims to create unusual visual works and the subdued surreal vibe she’s able to capture here certainly makes the work have an impact. The artist states that altering and editing photographs are an important step in her creative process, something that doubtlessly helps her fine-tune this unique photographic color palette. It’s amazing how the advancements in digital post-production have provided photographers with such a wide range of tools, leading to this part of the process sometimes becoming ‘as’ or even ‘more’ important than the snapping of the image itself. The narrative of the scene we witness remains a question, is the figure forever lost in the land of dreams or have we caught him/her at that moment when the barriers between fantasy and reality have grown their thinnest? Perhaps we are doomed to always wake up just before we find the answer.
