The sensory photogramic milieu that Slechta creates, then, is one in which light and movement constitute a new writing rich with hidden meanings. The artist induces colored traces or marks to emerge on the surface of his photographic paper and the results are luminous, direct transcriptions of color and kinetic gesture that remain fully and mysteriously on view for the viewer to behold. Slechta’s artworks on photographic paper, unique light and color sensitive manifestations, are carefully mounted onto a stiff, archival surface of aluminum. These surfaces bearing the photographic traces, hung onto the wall, have an object quality, a presence that is shared by traditional paintings. And yet the imagery is ghostly, ephemeral and decidedly body-less. Slechta’s photographic work with its stark yet radiantly poetic presence is, in a sense, mysteriously hermetic. One is forced to react in contradictory ways to what we see as marks indicative of shaped and colored light.

As the naïve viewer peers at the photographic paper surface, Slechta’s light infused and color loaded marks appear to the beholder as image dissemination resulting from a chemical or mechanical process associated with the species of technological inventions named photography.  Yet in the non-specialist’s mind photography, traditionally speaking, has extended and problematized the field of pictorial realism once dominated by painting.  Slechta’s marks and traces, however, as they are non-representational, seem to relate to fleeting optical sensations and ephemeral retinal impressions. These appear wholly unrelated to the very promise held of early photography: the fixing of discernable imagery such as landscapes, documents, artifacts, portraits, and other iconography related to the past or images suggesting forensic certitude.  Slechta’s hovering photo-based colors and marks, then, appear bodiless and numinous: transcriptions of another reality slightly out of reach and out of bounds.

We cannot but wonder what Slechta’s patterns and marks are derived from as his abstract photograms, by definition, are freed from the tasks of mimesis.  As such, Slechta’s experimentations with a form of abstract photography attempts to open up the dialog of the very terms that constitute something photographable from something not photographable or depictable in a traditional sense. Such an unanswerable conundrum adds to the mystique and aura of the work. It enhances the provocation that Slechta provides for the viewer: daring the beholder to try to conjure up and implement of a type of new knowledge or new criteria that is not pre-formed or received in any way.

Richard Slechta’s photograms capture essences and energies: supple traces of light in their relation to space and their chronological determination. Such dynamics of illumination tells us as much about light and its qualities as it does about the artist’s mind/body dynamic as he experiences a letting-go and an oneness with his materials and process. The theater of movement and its various intensities constitute the artist’s world of photograms; it envelops us within a universe that is uplifting, vitalistic, and joyful. 

Dominique Nahas is an independent critic and curator based in Manhattan.