Scott MacLeay : Marcuse Pfiefer Gallery

Extract Translation

Zoom Magazine, Summer 1985, Paris, France “ Scott MaLeay’s photos should be experienced via a physical rapport. While the identiication is physical, it is not psychological, his characters are regarded at a distance that prevents any sentimentality and puts me ill-at-ease. Should I identify with them, squeeze between them? Their color distances them from a carnal rapport, the faces are closed, isolated, they hide from one another, gestures pushing and holding back, others are close and far at the same time. Hands are very present: they protect from evil as one protects a child from blinding light or an overly bloody scene, like we protect him from a headache but they suffocate as well, preventing speech. Silence reigns in these photos like that of dreams when we yell for help and no cry is comes out......

These photos seem to state the horrible pain of a body that aspires to nothing more than to re-melt into the mists of time from where it emerged. The bodies here in this light sometimes evoke other emaciated bodies of our memories, but they acquire here a certain grandness, a solemnity that counterbalances cruelty. An image of a trio in which 2 characters come face-to-face with the third is like the essence of classic tragedy. What is written must come to pass, it is inevitable, but the choir is there to accompany destiny....... “ It is important that these are photographs and not drawings or paintings because the situations acquire a credibility that only a photo can provide Here we are confronted by nude bodies sculptural in aspect where the hands, neck, and legs are efigies sculpted in stone or bark, where the grain is the color of earth, of primates. And the light is that of savanna nights, full of unknown sounds when animals are unknowingly watched and we are voyeurs subjugated by a reality unaffected by time.”

Madeleine Deschamps, Art Historian and Critic, Article on the MacLeay’s Primates Series