Photography The surreal faceless portraits of Serhii Fett
Photographyportrait

The surreal faceless portraits of Serhii Fett

-
Collater.al Contributors

A faceless body in the middle of an ordinary room. A figure absorbed into a landscape that is real but doesn’t quite feel that way. It’s the scene that repeats itself, photograph after photograph, in the work of Serhii Fett, visual artist and photographer who has turned the erasure of the face into his most recognisable language.

His work grows out of an intuition as simple as it is radical, namely that everyday objects, a chair, a road, a piece of clothing, a bunch of flowers, don’t need to be made extraordinary on their own. It’s enough to shift the relationship between them for the scene to start operating according to a different emotional logic.

His images are staged, yet they keep an almost documentary physical credibility, as if they could really have happened, somewhere, to someone. It’s precisely in this tension, between the recognisable and what doesn’t quite add up, that the work finds its meaning.

The human body is where this friction becomes most visible. Faces always disappear, interrupted by objects or absorbed into the background, and the most familiar gestures suddenly become unreadable. Serhii Fett isn’t telling the story of one specific person, he’s building a condition that the viewer can step into without an instruction manual.

Every photograph is conceived as a stand-alone work, with no narrative or sequence to follow. Yet, seen together, they form a coherent visual language, a constant attempt to give physical shape to experiences that usually stay invisible: isolation, memory, absence, uncertainty.

The result is a conceptual photography closer to metaphysical painting, one that invites us to lose ourselves in a world much like our own, but carrying something surreal that unsettles and fascinates us at the same time. 

Photographyportrait
Written by Collater.al Contributors

Editor's Picks

x
Listen on