"To choose the (female) body as the subject and motif for one's first solo exhibition, as the Pula-based photographer Đani Celija did, means, first and foremost, being brave enough to tackle a theme as old as art itself. However, "Details of Intimacy," as the exhibition is titled, does not merely explore the intimate sphere of the model, who entrusts herself to the photographer and photography in the most hidden part of her life and psyche. It also touches upon the intimacy of the artist himself, who, for the first time, "extroverts" and exposes his inner self in the process of presentation we recognize as an exhibition. Therefore, this is a double intimate "exposure" — both that of the model and the author.
To make matters even more "serious," Celija is a professional photographer, with a diploma from the prestigious photography institute in Padua. He has worked in reportage, advertising, and industrial photography and specialized in still-life photography in Switzerland. When such a professional decides to create and exhibit something he has never done or exhibited before — having never chosen his themes and motifs nor exhibited solo — it's worth paying attention. In other words, one must be cautious and carefully examine the results.
Details of Intimacy is not an overblown, eroticized, passionate portrayal of the female body as a field of incarnate pleasure (or self-pleasure). Instead, it is a calm, almost "directed" photography that we most easily recognize within the concept of still-life. But not in the Croatian translation (mrtva priroda – "dead nature"), rather in the original meaning of the term: where "still" refers to something silent, motionless, mute, hushed, etc., and "life" refers to life itself. This quiet life of "Details of Intimacy" should and must be viewed and experienced as the core of Celija's artistic interest, one that, I believe, he will continue to sign in his future exhibitions as his artistic credo and vocation.
The square format of the frame and its size (110 x 110 cm) also suggest this calm, stillness, quietness... reminiscent of the classical painting technique known as central composition (or cross composition), where the dynamic is reduced to stillness, permanence, and a clear definition of "what is," creating a static situation in which the event seeks to be absolute and unquestionable. Celija's journalistic spirit and "touch," his long-standing experience in reportage photography, can be read in the margins of the photos, which are all (except in one instance) reflections of what the lens captured at the moment of shooting — they were not cropped later in the photo lab.
Since painting has already been mentioned, it’s worth highlighting a particular painterly-photographic feature of this series: the artist’s desire, intention, and achieved result of "coloring" black-and-white photographic scenes. Celija attempts (and succeeds) in capturing tonal transitions of gray between the extremes of non-color (white) and the maximal saturation of all colors (black), creating a tonal gradient that is not just a merger of two extremes but a unique coloristic feature of a separate world, one that echoes both contrasts and shades.
All of this points to an original artistic personality that has almost disregarded new technical-technological methods, techniques, and possibilities in favor of classicism — both in photography and aesthetics.
In a different (perhaps more important) interpretation of this work, Details of Intimacy can also be understood as the intimacy of details that derive their poetics from the process of defamiliarizing the everyday — which is, in essence, the original poetic principle and the foundation of authentic artistic creation."
Berislav Valušek
