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The blue of Gabriel Isak, a Swedish photographer, envelops us and almost overwhelms us, a blue with slight variations in imperceptibly different shades, but always blue, a blue that brings us back to other famous blues like in Chagall’s “Le paysage bleu” or Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” to that ultramarine blue IKB International Klein Blue invented by the brilliant Yves Klein.
Photographs where figures of women and men always appear without faces, silhouettes cut out in that blue that makes them live and comfort because in Gabriel there is a strong appeal to psychology and the influence of the years he went through depression. Hence the desire to shed light on mental health and inspire others who are going through similar issues.
“I use photography as a means to draw and paint surreal, minimal, and graphic images in their aesthetics, rich in symbolism and emotions, focusing on themes inspired by human psychology, dreams, and romanticism, as well as my experiences, particularly the years I went through depression.”
Photography as a panacea, photography as art that can help address issues that closely touch life, photography also, and perhaps, as a ritual for stabilizing balances for the mind and body.
Defined images that seem frozen, people and objects enclosed in blue spaces, magical boxes of perfect claustrophobic proportions, mathematical cutouts of surreal frozen figures in an eternal stillness where existences themselves are coloured blue, a blue thread that unites solitude, silence, restlessness, and melancholy.
A renewed surrealism that reminds us of the unreal atmospheres of Magritte, those apparent and illusory spaces where we find reality in the windswept hair of women facing a real sea but which seems fake like that silence of mute waves.
Gabriel Isak, who was born in Huskvarna, Sweden, and continues to live and work in Stockholm from where he travels around the world for personal and commissioned projects, graduated in Fine Arts in Photography from the Academy of Art University in San Francisco, California, in 2016. He has exhibited his work in solo shows at the Cannery Gallery in San Francisco, the Galeri deBernardo in Stockholm, and the Galerie XII in Shanghai and Paris, just to name a few. His works have been included in various important exhibitions including “Acclimatize” at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm, “Culture Pop” at M Contemporary, Sydney, and “Camera Obscura” at the Last Rites Gallery in New York. His work is in the permanent collection of the Falsterbo Photo Art Museum in Sweden. Currently, his works are on display in Sweden at the Falsterbo Photo Art Museum “Into the Blue” March 28 – June 9, Falsterbo, and at the Kvänum Kökets Hus, “UponWalls”, Kvänum, March-May 2024. In the Netherlands, the exhibition “Retrospect KunstRAI, Zerp Galerie, Rotterdam, April-May 2024. Finalist in the prestigious @Hasselblad Master 2023 competition in the ART category.
