Ferid Muhic

THE STARS ALSO SHINE DURING DAYTIME

On the thematic cycle Appearing and Disappearing by Boro Rudic, the master of photography

How many times have we fooled ourselves and believed our own eyes? How many times have we allowed to be convinced by the naïve reality of those who with confidence and pride have told us to “believe only what we see”? And yet, we have not once considered that the world does not cease to be when it disappears in front of our eyes. And we have not once asked ourselves if we should truly cease to believe in the existence of stars only because we do not see them. Relying solely on sight, confined in the routine of the directly seen, we have unthinkingly made the biggest mistake in believing that what we do not see in fact disappears. With half our lives awake, half our lives asleep, half our lives with eyes wide open, half with eyes closed, we have accepted the fallacy that the world truly appears and disappears. We have divided the world and our lives into two halves: that which we see, in whose existence we are convinced, and that which we do not see, hence, that which we treat as non-existent.

Believing only in what we see, and not believing in what we do not see, we live torn between light and darkness – between day and night. What a grave mistake, what an irreversible loss!

With his masterfully conceived thematic cycleof artistic photographs printed in this monograph, Boro Rudic has challenged this dichotomy. In his ecstatic moments of inspiration, he has shown us how to liberate ourselves from the blind belief in sight. Namely, he has managed to prove that sight is not an arbiter deserving of our unconditional trust.

Night is not the end of what was day; however strange it may seem, night is not the end of anything. Day is also not a despot who has banished the night; all that we see during the day, even the most glorious colors of the summer midday reflected in the waters of the dark pond, overhung by dogwood and hazel, glitter just as brightly at midnight. Boro Rudic has now given us the eyes to witness this. The world does not begin and end, it does not come into shape and vanish with light and dark, with day and night – it merely appears and disappears from our sight. To this effect, Boro Rudic designed a fascinating method of achieving the technical conditions for creating exceptional photographs, developing this method to the minutest detail, and carrying it out with the perfection worthy of the greatest artists. Hence, it seems that Boro Rudic in fact has realized a project of the highest artistic, philosophical and even existential meaning. Thus, it should be noted that this is an achievement that holds immense cognitive energy. Just gaze at the photographs in this monograph, note what they witness: and you will see day and night, united, happiness and melancholy, security and doubt, the foreboding of sunset and the golden wings of daybreak rumbling through thunder and lightning, and you will see how, together they cross their arrows in the immeasurable depths of the dark cumuli, and how they light up the sky with the fire of joy that they are together and that their separation has ended!

And every twig, every thorn is illuminated; and see how in the night, the angry green glow of the young beech leaves is outlined on the bouquet of roses – drops of blood from the ancient oak tree – and from the cracked rock, round and heavy like the Earth on Atlas’s shoulders, covered in bright gold lichens and drabmoss, with silver skin of fungi and pearl-shells, see how the delicate trunk of the aspen tree sprouts and splits the rock/Earth in two: but not in order to separate it, but to make two instead of one and merge the halves with its juices! See, behold, for these sights confirm that nothing is created when it appears and nothing disappears when it vanishes from sight. We see the body, but not the soul! Yes, but the body and soul exist, they are here, they are two things only for the sight, for the body truly is a visible soul and the soul truly is an invisible body! Light and dark are in fat mere veils drawn over the world, woven with the thread with which God wove the seams of Day and Night!

In the photographs of this exceptional book, day and night, light and darkness, as elements of the ontology of the seen world, are unriddled and interpreted with an artistic virtuosity of suggestiveness that leaves no room for doubt. Appearing and disappearing are only instances when the visible and invisible change places: what has appeared before the eyes was not created from nothing; what has disappeared from sight has also not vanished into nothing! All things in the world are always here, appearing and disappearing. Even those no longer with us. They have also not vanished, they are here, with us, invisible like stars during daytime, even though we can no longer see them; just like the stars are here, in the sky, with us, just like they shine during the day when God blinks and night substitutes day.

By his conceptual originality, by the level of his artistic realization, by the high standards of the final artifact, this exclusive monograph is in itself an anthological aesthetic event in the sphere of photographic art, promoting Boro Rudic into a capital figure of contemporary Macedonian art.