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Victor Macarol :: Silver Prints
May 8 2003
 This is the first Asian presentation of works by the distinguished international master of photography.
It is a rare opportunity for collectors, art-lovers and fellow artists here to get acquainted with the unique artistic outlook of Victor Macarol, international photographer,whose silver prints are regularly exhibited worldwide and had been auctioned at Sotheby's.
Part of the proceeds from sales of exhibited works and limited editions of art postcards/poster by Victor Macarol goes to charitable non-profit organization, the Giving-Back Foundation, Singapore.
The opening of Victor Macarol's exhibition on May 8th, 2003 also marked the official opening of Front.Room.Gallery.
" ...Victor is endowed with the elegant European spirit and tastes that are part of his artistic curiosity and beliefs. He continues on the path of Stieglitz, Atget, Kertesz as well as Steichen, Strand and Frank, and even Adams, to observe and to transform...to transform a small pile of pumpkins along the Route 518 in New Jersey into the almost eerie vision of coming storm...or to enliven the cold marble statue in Paris' Jardin des Tuileries to start feeding the pigeons; or to turn the misty late autumn family picnic in Toms River into a contemplative pictorial equivalent of Stieglitz's Gossip-Katwyk.
In his visual statements, he takes you on long trips within small areas that are almost like cutouts of the Bigger World, wherever it is located. As a viewer you have a choice to accept it as a simple life situation or to see it as a major symbol instead. In both cases you are the winner, experiencing the highest visual gratification.
His talent makes cats and dogs live in harmony...What more could we ask in the times of Unknown...?"
Gradimir Aleksic
Front Room Gallery, Singapore
"...There is nothing grandiose about this truly subtle work: no ambitious vistas, no distant horizons or eternal snows. It goes to the very heart of the most ordinary moments in the everyday lives of Macarol's people, and seems to fan the wonderful sparks created by the interplay between his unwitting accomplices. Just like a painting by René Magritte or a poem by Jacques Prévert, the emotional appeal of a photograph by Victor Macarol is universal. The symbols in his silver prints speak clearly around the world, without need of explanation..."
Francoise Monnin
Muséart, Paris, France
" ...Macarol's perceptiveness of what he is trying to accomplish has to do with the discovery of relationships which exist momentarily within the life of the urban environment. In his work the purity and the harshness of reality coexist: much of the work has to do with his unique sense of humor that amuses the viewer at first until the real meaning it represents or masks is realized. Macarol's is a vision to be savored..."
Dr. Abraham A. Davidson
Department of Art History
Tyler School of Art, Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
" ...It's the people who endow these [Victor Macarol's] photographs not only with warmth, but also with a pressing vitality that is transferred to their surroundings, thus making the inanimate seem all the more animate and lively."
David L. Shirey
The New York Times
" ...No mean landscapist either, Mr. Macarol can invest with Ansel Adams-like grandeur a pile of pumpkins in a harrowed field under a stormy sky. The best of his romantic shots is of mountain peaks glistening like marble under another stormy sky."
Vivien Raynor
The New York Times
"Concrete and abstract elements combine in Macarol's silver prints, hard-edged and amorphous; philosophical, psychological and cultural; spatial and geometric. Macarol is also a teller of tales, a fabulist, a witty Aesop who hides his morals. He uses the aspects of poetry and music - rhythm, accent, counterpoint, unbroken chords and arpeggio - visually, painting sound and movement with light. This of course, might not produce a work of art but for Macarol's magic."
Peggy Lewis
Discovering Victor Macarol
" ...Honing textures and observing or otherwise exposing surfaces usually hidden, Victor Macarol bends light to his purposes. He turns everyday events into fables, myths and epics, setting them in an aura of mystery that he leaves to the viewer to solve...In a print, for example, Macarol has captured two young women as they frolic on earth-bound stilts somewhere in a loading zone of industrial Manhattan. They seem to have been born of the same inspiration John Keats found for his famous ode on Lord Holland's urn. As they perform to silent music, they suggest the permanence of art, of beauty..."
Peggy Lewis
Art Matters, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
" ...Victor Macarol is unquestionably one-of-a-kind. The artist mixes ingredients in his photographic studies the way a chemist mixes elements, taking them to the stage where they cannot be separated out. Remarkably, the viewers are left to draw their own conclusions about what the artist has captured for them. Essentially, the message has been the same: This is our world. I give it to you unadorned. The photo "Dog and Cat," one from the collection on display at The New Jersey State Museum, trumpets that message as eloquently as any. A pugnacious - or is it tender - boxer is guarding - or is it bullying - a kitten. They are part of a city landscape - or are they alienated from it? The questions are at least as interesting, one suspects, as the answers!"
Sally Friedman
The Princeton Packet, New Jersey
" ...A social satirist who creates humor from a dissonant note in a scene or the juxtaposition of conflicting elements, Victor Macarol extends the meaning of the ordinary signs and cultural forms of society by adding an ironic twist and a sense of mischief."
Robert Goldman
The Sunday Star-Ledger, New Jersey
 Victor Macarol exhibits frequently in the USA and Europe. His works have recently appeared in exhibitions in New York City; Paris, France; Zurich and Basel, Switzerland. They are in the permanent art collections of Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne and Kunsthaus in Zurich, Switzerland, The New Jersey State Museum in the United States, and Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris.
Limited editions of museum posters, lithographs and art-postcards by Victor Macarol have been published in Switzerland, Italy and Holland under the aegis of Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland.
These works are available in Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Holland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom, and the United States.
They are/were displayed in various institutions, such as:
Centre National d'Art et de Culture Georges Pompidou in Paris
MJM Art Gallery and French Kisses in New York City;
Devon Editions in Seattle, WA;
Espace Aleph,Paris
Entrée des Artistes, Paris,
Antiquariat-Bücher in Vienna, Austria;
Plakatif Galerie, Galerie Chat Noir, Jäggi Buch-Handlung in Basel,
Buch-Handlung Payot in Zurich,
Musée de l'Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland;
Art Print Japan Co., Ltd. in Tokyo.
Some online resources:
Victor Macarol's personal site
photography-guide.com
The Newark Public Library, New Jersey
The Princeton Packet, New Jersey
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