Frames of fusion

Gina Brezini's kaleidoscopic works bring together photography and painting, inspired by icons and fetishes.

Lending truth to the adage that art is a mirror to the artist’s soul is Gina Brezini, who lives in New York, not with a Yankee twang but a heavy Italian accent, and reveals: “I’m Bulgarian, actually.” Conversing with her, it is impossible to not be riveted to her striking eyes. Her work is equally enchanting — a truly one-off combination, a product of the photographer’s eye and the painter’s brush coming together.

“Forcing images one over the other, I document the fragmented structure of the moments of our lives,” she says of her unique method — which she calls the Condensed Image Photographic Technique (CIPT). It might sound straight out of a experiment in a physics laboratory, but the results are defintely more aesthetic. Besides, what lends value to these works is the fact that, surely, you won’t find more than a handful of practitioners attempting something like this.

Put simply, Brezini shoots multiple exposures on a single film frame, deliberately mixing separate images, which, she says, are intertwined together only by her intuition. A final touch is photopainting on the exposed frames.

“It happened one day when I had to pick up a camera to shoot a portrait of myself. I found it is the best medium to capture the immediacy of the moment. I went further when I found that my creative process began after the first shot,” says Brezini.

It takes time for her work to be absorbed. Her latest works are part of a book and exhibition series titled Dus Mahavidyas — Ten Goddesses of Art, a compilation of works by 10 female artists. The hodge-podge of exposures, colour, human forms and abstract patterns seem to move in symphony to reveal subjects who are “idols” from India — M F Husain, Shubha Mudgal, Rama Henna — and abstract works, which she calls “gods”.

Brezini says she has always been spiritually fascinated by the goddess Saraswati. The search for her even led the artist to Bali, one of the farthest outposts of Hinduism. Her first stop for her current work was a session with veteran artist M F Husain at the latter’s residence-in-exile in Dubai. Finishing her portraiture of him with his interpretation of “Saraswati” (which does not find place in the series due to all the “fuss” it might create), she moved on to focus on and accentuate the legendary artist’s feet. “I was captivated by his feet which have travelled the world, never covered by footwear.”

Lined up next was vocalist Shubha Mudgal, whom Brezini decided to frame in the midst of patterns created by her “wonderful collection” of tanpuras. “It was quite invasive trying to capture her with my huge lens right in her face. So, I told her to perform and carried on from there.”

Dancer Rama Henna was shot in a dark auditorium in Delhi. Brezini says the contrasting light provided the mood for the compositions and also managed to play on another of Brezini’s fetishes — jasmine. “I love the smell of jasmine. I love New York, but I will eventually move to India just for the flowers’ fragrance,” she says. Brezini was born in Sofia and her parentage is Italian-Bulgarian. She grew up in Bulgaria, lived in Italy, before finally moving to New York 15 years ago. I ask whether her works are a manifestation of her continued search for identity. “I have thought of that. There was a time when I even tried to fit into New York by taking classes to change my accent. But then, this is who I am.” You can see it in her works.