The Waste Land – The Place Where Elephants Come to Die

Edith Torony delivers photography that is allusive, provocative, critical and interrogative, almost always forcing an answer for the big existential questions. Her images echo the idea of history, spirituality, art history, music, philosophy, topography, architecture, even going as far as to exploit clichés or symbols of an absolute banality, where freezing in a time of the absurd encapsulates the agony of the present. The artist brings the cultural issue to the foreground of contemporary metadiscourse, jettisoning aesthetics, visual sophistication, fragrance and beauty in favour of criticism and a severe and highly moralistic language.

Edith Torony’s photography engages axiological and ethical statements, sets up a referential discourse about identity, ownership, a priori categories by which humans operate within the given world, a world in which anxiety characterizes human consciousness.

Her photography can be broadly seen as a power-grab of the present, which tends to camouflage its compromised past – the debt of this time that has placed the artist in a certain cultural context, in a certain geographical area, that has defined her identity, her human condition and that has censored her memory. In the photographic space the artist develops a museum of devastation, a microcosm of collective memory, compositions on existential matters, exploring themes such as the human condition, anamnesis, identity or abandonment and where moral and spiritual values have been consigned to the world – a world beyond God’s immediate control.

There are several layers of meaning beyond the image, interrogative associations such as visible-invisible, telestial-ancestral, essence-appearance, where the focus does not fall on the drama of the composition, it is only a metaphor of human tragedy in a theatre where death and destruction prevail and where there is no certainty that religion and faith are part of the solution. If in the painting the artist uses an impetuous chromatic palette, oxidized colours, caustic colours, rust, neon, off-white, which are clustered in the composition, under the purple sky, either electric, either vesper, in photography her imaginary range is minimalist, in detail, desolate scenery, hibernal landscapes, fossils, remnants of a decomposed, atrophied world, like the magic mountain – the place where elephants come to die.

One cannot speak of a lack of humanity in Edith’s photography, nor in her painting, because humanity is omnipresent in everything, identifying itself in the remainder (that Lacanian remainder, which remains after nothing remains), identifying itself in the cycle of degradation and regeneration, through the imprint on the slice of history curved into itself. The artist thus attributes to photography and to her painting a metaphysical significance that is related to the human condition, to her creative destiny, for humanity, living in the horizon of mystery, is “damned” to the revelation of mysteries (1937, Lucian Blaga, The Genesis of Metaphor and the Meaning of Culture).

Dana Sarmes