Gabriel Matula
Gabriel Matula is a photographer and videographer who has exhibited at the Malba Museo de Arte Moderno in Buenos Aires. His work has been published in Photo Vogue Italia and Spectrum XVII. Notable awards from IPA (International Photography Awards) include 1st, 3rd, and honorable mention awards in the beauty category. Besides his fine art photography, Gabriel has also conducted fashion and advertising photo work for Samsung, Vogue, L’Oreal, Vice Media, and Capture One Pro.
Most of Gabriel’s current contemporary fine art photography revolves around the character of Ophelia from Shakespearean literature. The photographs may be reminiscent of scenes out of Pre-Raphaelite painting by artists such as John William Waterhouse and John Everett Millais. Although one does not need to know about Hamlet or the Pre-Raphaelite painters in order to understand or appreciate these deeply theatrical photographs.
The depiction of dying or deceased young beautiful maidens in water invokes a sense of tragic beauty. With Gabriel’s photography, he projects a sense of fragility and delicate, somber mood around the devastating and dramatic portrayal of women in isolation, floating in the pond as if giving up on life or literally suggesting the passing of immediate suicide. Through the invocation of fragility and beauty, Gabriel recreates moods, themes, and literature from the Elizabethan era. These fashionable figures in white dresses, floating in ponds, address both the concept of marriage and a makeshift funeral. Through these notions, the photography becomes an allegory of both the beginning of a new life and the end of mortality.
One of Gabriel's darkest photographs (pictured above) from the Ophelia series portrays a young maiden covered in shadow floating upon a pond. She lays lifeless with an assortment of dying flowers around her composition. The delicate detail of the folds of fabric from her dress. both floating out of and submerged in water. reflects a deep psychological impulse on mortality and time. Ophelia’s youth and fragility being consumed by the water.
Gabriel Matula explores the fusion of literature with visual art in contemporary circumstances and particularly with the modern technology of photography. Like a theatre director, he recreates scenes from literature, not with handmade props, but with model acting and natural scenery. Gabriels’ works can be described as beautiful and dark, full of life but also despair and tragedy. He provokes the audience to contemplate not only our own mortality but also the fragile life of others, particularly of young, beautiful women.
