“My work is about the longing to liberate all our pain and impulses…It is about the isolation and sense of utter loneliness we all deeply feel inside, that stubborn and resilient hunger we suffer from, that constant longing which we never satisfy or nourish.”

CHARLES BALZAN

“G”
Feb. 2019
from the Vulnerability Project (Ongoing)
Courtesy of the artist

Eve Cocks: Your photographs are often dubbed as raw and vulnerable. How would you best describe your work and the concept behind it?

Charles Balzan: My work starts with my anxious nature. It is about trying to get an honest, sometimes brutal, glimpse into our primal and vulnerable side, a primal place within us which hasn’t yet been tainted by society or any form of constructed behaviour, a place in ourselves we rarely are aware of, let alone dare to see.

EC: Can you tell us about your path to photography?

CB: I consider myself a multidisciplinary artist and try to use the best medium that would fit the project at hand. For the current project I am working on, the Vulnerability Project, I am using photography as this was a development of a previous body of work. After publishing my family documentation book Not Alone, I wanted to see what would happen if I tried the same approach of unfiltered intimacy with friends. Instinct is fundamental to me. I am in awe of how we are so alike but, at the same time, totally alien to each other. For me, every session is a different experience, and this is possible because I respect the individual’s uniqueness. I use the word ‘session’ rather than ‘shoot’ as it is a better definition of my working process.

“F”
Feb. 2019
from the Vulnerability Project (Ongoing)
Courtesy of the artist

EC: You generally present your subjects against a red backdrop. Can you tell us more about your working process?

CB: My process can be seen as therapeutic, where the individual I am photographing is open to explore certain aspect of herself or himself without inhibition and shame. Chance is crucial to the way I work. The use of the red background was, in fact, incidental. On a gut level, I realised that this worked; it became a common aspect of each photographing session. I don’t have a fixed idea of how I am going to take an image. This develops gradually over the course of the session. It stems from a collaborative space which I set up within my studio. Our dialogue becomes centred around our fears and the intimate exposure of our vulnerable self. The studio is a place where there are no social conventions, where one can speak and act freely. It is an almost protected, embryonic space.

EC: The female and male nudes in your photographs are often portrayed in daring body postures and gestures, evoking a sense of uneasiness in the viewer. How and what made you develop an interest in this subject matter? Was it to break traditional representations of ‘god-like’ nudes in fine art photography?

CB: My search is an honest, almost brutal attempt at exploring vulnerable and sometimes unflattering aspects of the self, a sort of cutting away to the bone to reveal interior aspects, the exploration of which are at times denied. My work is about the unconscious longing we have to regain our primal sense of animal physiology. The longing comes back each time a brutal moment is experienced. Rage makes us grind our teeth. Terror and atrocious suffering turn our mouth into an organ of rending screams, sometimes silent. We take a bestial posture as we throw back our heads whilst frenetically stretching our necks in such a way that our mouths almost become an extension of our spinal columns… a sort of impulse to try to spurt out from our mouths all internal conflicts. It is about the longing to liberate all our pain and impulses by unconsciously going to a primal state where various body postures can give a sense of relief. It is about the sweat and the smell of bodies, of all our vulnerabilities, the isolation and sense of utter loneliness we all deeply feel inside, that stubborn and resilient hunger we suffer from, that constant longing which we never satisfy or nourish. This leads to the uneasiness you mention.

“L”
Jan. 2019
from the Vulnerability Project (Ongoing)
Courtesy of the artist

“C”
Jan. 2019
from the Vulnerability Project (Ongoing)
Courtesy of the artist

EC: Nudity restrictions on Instagram and Facebook make it difficult for artists like you to present their works online. Your Instagram account has, in fact, been banned on several occasions. What’s your take on this?

CB: Someone once told me, “Every time you compromise a vision, you lose a bit of your humanity”, and I totally agree. Unfortunately, we live in strange and paradoxical times. Fine art nude photographs of overweight, scarred or hairy bodies are banned online as they are seen as obscene and disgusting. Instead, hyper-sexualized posts by renown personalities, banal in nature, are seen as appropriate and allowed on these platforms. My work has been demoted and censored on so many occasions that at a certain point in time I only posted ‘suitable’ images. This meant that I was giving an impression that was different from the work that I was actually producing.

Born in Australia in 1974, Charles Balzan is a visual artist based in Malta. He studied design many years ago and mainly uses drawing, etching, photography and installation as investigative tools. He destroys a good 95% of what he creates and hardly ever exhibits any of the remaining 5% but, as part of a New Year resolution he promised to be more lenient with himself and to exhibit more. Four years ago, EDE Books published his photo book NOT ALONE, a project that explored his immediate family intimately. In 2014, he won a national art competition with his installation CORE. His works have been presented in recent group shows, including X-posed at the Art Academy London (Elephant & Castle, 2019); NUD. A Naked Collective at DESKO (Valletta, Malta, 2019); and SMUDGE at Studio 87 (Valletta, Malta, 2019).

You can view more of Charles Balzan’s work here.