Anton Yelchin – Provocative Beauty

author ALESSIO DE’ NAVASQUES

A path of life that transcends death, the strength and courage of a soul that overcomes fear and disease: this is the moral will left behind by Anton Yelchin, talented actor, musician and photographer – a truly pure artistic spirit to its very core. Provocative Beautyrecreates the actor’s life through frames of love, fear, and friendship, as well as atmospheres and protagonists of films such as Star Trekand Alpha Dog.

Part of Videocittà visual festival program, and hosted at Spazio Field, the exhibition was conceived as a contemporary mark that highlights new perspectives within the Brancaccio princes’ ancestral home.

Saturations, overexposures and the shifts of chiaro-scurotell of a heart wrenching and dystopian American landscape, and become filters through which to see the complexities of the inner world.

The artist’s search for a deeper meaning within his every-day worldly odyssey – the never-ending engagements and trips around the world, the changes of scenery and of situations – is the thread that links the exposed photographs together. His being is split, multiplied in thousands of different shades that paint his portraits under different lights, at times more masculine, at others more feminine, yet always marking the artist’s sense of right or wrong.

The collection is a continuous questioning of his own personality, a perfect parallel of an actor’s shift between different roles and personifications. It is a profound search that drowns the viewer in the darkest corners of his existence, deep in the innermost meanders of fear and transgression, hidden enough in the place in which the questioning of our existence seizes to be optional. The chromatic contrasts reveal movements in time: figures, masks, familiar and grotesque faces, mice and mythologies of the subconscious. The cycles and series of photographs are inspired by the LA way of life, the Sex Pistols’ lead guitarist Steve Jones, his childhood friends Ryan and Flannery as well as shots for magazines such as Bulletand King Kong.

“I always have the gnawing desire to create something I agree with emotionally, plus the sensation that I know nothing and must learn more.” Yelchin’s passion and interest in the photographic medium showcased an alternate and abstract narrative through which to document sensations in sensual and fetishist forms. As he explained: “I think the beauty of images is that they are by definition fetishes and every image (banal or not) as a fetish holds within it the promise of a sensuousness that (without generalising) at least I, as a human being, am drawn to.”

Yelchin took photographs as if they were branches of the film and screen’s dimensions: throughout this exhibition his evolution as a photographer can be clearly traced, beginning at the studying of his childhood neighbourhood’s flowers, to the impact of Von Sternberg’s noirs and Scorsese’s 70’s aesthetic on his own. Provocative Beautyis the precious evidence of a joyous and passionate existence, the testament of an artists’ love for his job and life, despite any and every struggle of the surrounding world.