For the Spanish photographer Olga Sala the nude, especially the female one, is her favoured subject. To her it is a thematic and poetic point of reference to be fully exploited for the purposes of her primary interests, as well as legitimate and appropriate: to bend her predominantly digital camera, to her moods and to bend her moods themselves to her visions of research.
Even though she is young, she has not intended to rest on the aesthetic effect of the photo. She has not neglected it (Vogue has paid no small amount of attention to this aspect of the photographer) and rather has made it a path parallel to her major and compulsory interest, that of searching for the new, an attitude fundamentally based on her expressive impulse, moods and intense dialogue with nature.
But it is not a question of naturalism. In fact, Olga Sala looks at nature under a double profile: as an important sentimental and intellectual reference and as an occasion in which she encounters the proscenium, each time different, for her morphological and compositional interest.
This especially refers to the nude, which she considers a beauty not to be celebrated but to be exploited in the dialogue between the variegated morphology of anatomy and the endlessly surprising morphology of nature. And she aims to merge them. And in that fusion her mood and her drive towards a connotative condition (the language of art) and denotative condition (the ethical-aesthetic message) creep into.
The nude can be swallowed up or metabolized by nature when it presents a virginal and timeless atmosphere. So the nude and everything around could recall the ecstatic timelessness of Henri Rousseau.
Her nude is polysemic and basically devoted to a performative action. It an insinuate itself and merge into the rocky environment in the name of a homeostasis that is realized on a morphological and chromatic level.
Often the body “acts” from behind, stretched horizontally, curvilinear, and with its entire length in a desert area which affects it as with light and shadows. But you do not deal with mimicry. Instead with is a cryptic dialogue between body and nature: they merge but do not confuse, they maintain a docile dialectical relationship.
The model can also dress, as when she is wrapped in a white. Also in this case the body offers its back and that light mass of white is perfectly harmonious and synergic with respect to nature’s chiaroscuro chromaticity. In this work black and white dominates, but without chiaroscuro does not play so much, and the body, seated, stands out in decisive verticality.
In any case, chiaroscuro is a privileged linguistic modality for Olga Sala. A ductile chiaroscuro, anyway. In fact, it does not focus on black and white, but expresses itself variously as far as the chromatic plane is concerned, with a prevalence of brown (a sort of dark pearwood). In any case, the nude almost always becomes a mysterious morphology because of how the artist cleverly plays with light, thus contributing to the metamorphic and polysemic value of the body.
