Souls
Photography
It all begins with a meeting.
Human relationships and daily life are the ideal realms in which to find the right subjects. In fact, Sara Zamperlin doesn’t choose her models based on predefined aesthetic rules at all. Instead she looks for a decisive characteristic; for a striking personality.
Then she moves on to observation. It’s a deep and penetrating examination, bordering on the obsessive. What matters most is what lies beneath the facade, the motivations hidden behind a look, and the tensions buried within. Sara Zamperlin aims to liberate the inner impulses that drive her subjects and to give voice to their souls.
To get past the masks that each of us create, Sara uses photography: Slowly digging through a series of successive shots, she lets the true essence of her models emerge.
Only at this point does she move on to the canvas: A photograph would be too perfect, too clean and orderly to represent the emotions that dominate us.
On the canvas we find shades of grey, green, and blue laid out in such a way as to become almost monochrome, creating an intimate atmosphere. We’re underneath the superficiality of bright lights and colors, Sara Zamperlin wants to transport us to the level of the spirit.
The large format amplifies the intensity of the expressions. The poses, whether extremely spontaneous or totally staged, are never banal. They reveal real people.
Lines of resin drip down the finished paintings breaking up the technical perfections as a final gesture: physical, indiscriminate and as such terribly human, much like the faces of Sara Zamperlin.
Elisa Rubino