Ignas Maldus V. 2
- Michael Hanna
- 10 hours ago
- 3 min read
Ignas Maldus is a scenic and light design photographer with a background in theatre and has exhibited in Lithuania, Germany, and the United States. Recent exhibitions include Photoszene Festival in Köln, Germany, GODO Gallery and Compensa Art Hall in Vilnius, Antazavės Manor gallery in Antazavė, Lithuania, Aura Copeland Gallery in Miami, Azerbaijan State Museum of Art in Bakı, and Vilnius Railway Station. Ignas is a member of the Lithuanian Photographers Union, LATGA, and has served as an Ambassador of Kaunas as well as a Laureate of the Lithuanian National Culture and Art.
Most of Ignas’ photography incorporate light design applied to dilapidated buildings and structures while the rest of his photography portrays staged acting and modeling against backdrop of unusual scenery. Ignas goes to great lengths to visit some of the most remote and abandoned industrial locations on the planet, from capturing abandoned airplane and ship yards to demolished structures and remote abandoned villages far removed from civilization. HIs light design photography incorporates a time consuming technique of ‘painting’ various structures with colored lights for hours and slowly capturing the light on long exposures with his camera.
These destroyed and abandoned structures are metaphorically given new life as they are covered in colored illumination in order to breathe nourishment into their aged existence. Like an apparition, these structures convey a sense of lost civilization of the recent past from the 20th century. These ‘relics’ connotate the aging of recent history against the bypassing of the digitized contemporary world. There remains a sense of vast emptiness in portraying battered structures which have seen great destruction from being neglected for only a few decades. Ignas’ figurative works portray interactions with these vast spaces, from having his figures pose in a manner of a mannequin doll, dancing nude, or even climbing the structures with scaffolding. The behavior of the light and figures of his works conveys a sense of wanting to breathe sustenance and nourishment into his subjects which would appear decayed and lifeless without his interjection and artistic vision.
Manors in Magic # 2 (pictured above) depicts a mansion at an undisclosed location carefully and meticulously staged with light design. The interior expresses a cyan color while the tree stump and foreground reveal a magenta. We find the tractor in front of the manor remains painted with cyan while the trees are ‘painted’ with green. The night sky appears defined with the flat black in the background followed by what appears to be streaks of light accidentally captured from long exposures. With a sense of spookiness and macabre, Ignas conveys the manor to appear haunted with ghostly lights emanating from the windows as if an apparition has appeared in the interior.
Ignas Maldus remains an exciting photographer who manipulates unusual subject matter of decayed environments and breathes new life into them with the art of light. His majestic techniques have a deeply contemporary aesthetic to them, as if to celebrate these dilapidated structures, rather than to mourn their demise. His willingness to travel to the most remote parts of the world in order to identify his unusual subject matter reveals an artist highly dedicated to his craft. Through poetry and nuance, Ignas guides the viewer through a journey of dramatic revealing of the contemporary unknown, the mysterious, and even the suggestively haunted experiences of revisiting lifeless structures stripped to the bone.
