Graceful female figures loungue in fashionable poses. Paper costumes that seem borrowed from Oskar Schlemmer’s triadic ballet make the ballerinas look like marionettes.
Their dislocation recalls the puppets Hans Bellmer featured in his surreal photographic experiments. Frida Kahlo’s face with her dark, furrowed eyebrows, peers at the viewer out of different scenes; her hair is knotted artfully on her head.
The allusions evoked in the imaginative creations of Colombian fashion photographer Efren Isaza are diverse: he cites and alienates an arsenal of styles before melding them into new compositions. It might be a certain scene, a poem, a petal of a flower or the idea of a person that inspires a new work. His passion for breaking the boundaries of traditional fashion photography is palpable in each of Isaza’s works.
He is less concerned with fashion than with the image – the play of contrasts – and the magic and emotions – sometimes saturnine, sometimes buoyant, sometimes surreal, and yet always beguiling – that the image transports.