“I am not a photographer,” Bernard Voïta says. His interest lies not so much in photography as a technical medium but rather as a medium of perception, as a means of visually transforming reality. To this end, he does use a camera to produce his works. As early as 1990, Voïta was already showing black-and-white photographs that caused quite a stir because they generated an extremely idiosyncratic eality without resorting to the usual techniques of manipulation and alienation. What appeared at first sight to be montage or collage, proved onsecond sight, to be a complex, three-dimensional installation
in the studio, which looked like a two-dimensional image only from one specific perspective: these were meticulously composed pictures that had no equivalent in reality. Bernard Voïta, born in Cully in 1960, has devoted himself to the same procedure ever since. Stubbornly and persistently, he has been elaborating his fantastic visions of being and seeming, consistently confronting viewers with ever new,
disconcerting variations on perception. “Melencolia”, named after Albrecht Durer’s famous engraving, is an elaborately, masterfully handcrafted, long-term project, which is both intellectually challenging and a visual pleasure
