The exhibition entitled “A Perfect Poet” is not a traditional photo exhibition which should show us the way the photographer sees the world, the moments of his life and surrounding which he managed to snap with his camera’s eye. The thirteen photographs exhibited here are a photographic reading of a poetic work sublimed into eleven poems. Therefore, this exhibition is a photographic-poetic dialogue between Saso Dimoski’s camera and Igor Isakovski’s pen, a space in which the image meets the word, space in which they touch each other and rub against each other, coming out new from these touches and frictions – both the image and the word.
By carefully listening and looking into this dialogue, one can conclude that its main theme is not the title of the exhibition – “a perfect poet”, a syntagm ironized both by the poem ending with this verse (“As I Peed in My Home Toilet”) and the photo of the broken toilet seat left at a public place, under a deep shadow. The essential questions that these two authors open are in the yellow truck overgrown with grass and the verses of the poem “You Are Alone at the Barricades Again, Jan Palace”, in the resignation of the loner’s conclusion that they both share, and Igor squeezes into these verses: “there are / less and less of us, fools / who believe and breathe truth”. This loneliness is the one of the author who has always and only lived his work stimulated by the transitory, but almost to spite death, recognizing it and passing by it at the same time, just as the woman holding a child in her arms at the thirty year old photo by the poem “At the Graveyard”.
This creative loneliness twinkles in the black and white melancholy of Saso’s photos and Igor’s poems. It is omnipresent – once in the close tranquillity of the images (graves next to the poem “I Don’t Know Which One of Us Is More Alive”), once in the distant winter sun somewhere in the fourth field of the photograph next to the poem “It Doesn’t Smell Like Winter”. The dead bird, the dog with his legs wide open, ironing, pissing, writing, with all of this both of them have the world around them seen and noted, and yet they distance themselves from its (for them often so inspirational) banalities. “We cry calmly / because of crying in ourselves / and not because of cover pages” – says Igor, while Saso nuances his only portrait at this exhibition gentle blue, and uses reddish-brown for the rain, today, the rain that falls “on the city like on a circus tent…”
the art is inside
