Text by Pen Dalton (Solely In My Head Show at Tokarska Gallery London, 2012)

The main body of the gallery is taken up with the stunning monochrome photographs in the "Reincarnation" series. What first strikes one as viewer is the sense of immense technical control and channeled energy it must have taken to produce photographs of such quality: such pristine cleanliness, stillness and order. Vio photographs flowers, live animals and natural objects in magnificent close-up, apparently capturing the essence of every immaculately groomed hair and whisker, every grain of pollen and vein of petal without blur or loss of focus. Real animals: messy, smelly, animated animals – dogs and apes and decaying blooms are all captured, cleaned, controlled and rendered iconic in unnaturally still and human-like portrait poses. They gaze out at the viewer with clear and knowing eyes – the stillness that Barthes noted* - photography captures so well. Bloom, crystal, dog, ape are resized to the same equivalent scale and arranged in rows like text or Egyptian hieroglyphics and thus invested with latent mysterious meanings and readings. Like the Rosetta stone they represent three equivalent ways of saying the same thing: different stages in the process of re-incarnation. Their common colouring into sepia tint suggests that they all exist in a timeless archaic realm, a reincarnation of the same identity, distilled over time in fetish images drawn from identification with the natural world.

One wall is taken up by a large group of nine immaculate photographs, each separately surfaced with highly reflective glass: nine flower heads divorced from their natural context, without soil or leaf or twig. Each bloom eloquent in its specificity, is unnaturally ripped from its growth and nurture in the past and presented in relation to other blooms in an awkward circle where the void of the black background says as much as the flower heads themselves. Like immigrants, these blooms are slightly damaged by their experience; they have no reference to their past but make new relationships in an alien culture creating new rhythms and modes of being. Vio subtly avoids the formal artistic cliché of limiting associations of flowers to a woman’s body or vagina; yes, her pictures of blooms imply a human identity but they speak more – in their acceptance of slight blemishes, bruises and decay – of the passing of time, the effects of human intercourse and the vulnerability of the void of loneliness.

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Text for ‘Les Rencontres d’Arles’ 2011

The series is a product of my recent interest in Reincarnation.

Researching numerous studies into this topic I was astonished by how different these were. Some of the studies proclaim that afterlife would also be possible in the bodies of animals, stones and flowers. The theory caught my imagination and fascinated with it I set off on my mission of creating an agent to make the audience to reflect on the idea.

I have chosen deep black background and duotone to take viewers’ attention away from colors and create a mystical and surreal atmosphere.

As a final step the ready lambda-prints were originally mounted on diasec©, so that viewers can see their reflection imbedded into the image teasing their inquisitiveness.

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Text ART.FAIR 21 2007 (deutsch)

Die ausgestellten Bilder sind Teil eines großen Fotoprojektes, das die Auseinandersetzung mit dem Thema Reinkarnation reflektiert.

Reinkarnation meint die Tatsache, dass der Mensch mehrere Erdenleben durchmacht. Viele Religionen beziehen es neben menschlichen Körpern auch auf Steine, Pflanzen und Tiere. So glauben z.B. die Dayak von Borneo, dass die Seele siebenmal so lange im Jenseits lebt wie auf Erden, dass sie dann noch einmal auf die Erde zurückkehrt und dort als Gras oder Blume wiedergeboren wird.

Auf einer Monochromaufnahme wird die Wahrheit der Fotografie auf das Wesentliche reduziert.

Um die gewünschte Komposition umzusetzen, ging ich nah an meine Motive heran und ließ allmählich alle unerwünschten Details verschwinden.

Aufgrund der fehlenden Farben sind die Arbeiten einen Schritt weiter von der so genannten Realität entfernt. Bei den Bildern sieht man einen schwarzen Bereich hinter den Blumen, dies schafft einen Eindruck von Unendlichkeit und lenkt den Blick und die Gedanken des Betrachters durch nichts ab.

…Denn alles Fleisch ist wie Gras, und alle Herrlichkeit der Menschen wie des Grases Blume. (1.Petrus 1, 23-25.)