PAST EXHIBITIONS
ANACHRONISMS, June 26th, 2008
Featuring work by Edith Bergfors, Tobias Rose & Reuben Leprevost
“As far as the worlds of the historical and legendary are concerned, we have already
had occasion to see how photography’s indexical nature turns historical subjects into anachronisms.” [ THE SPOKEN IMAGE : PHOTOGRAPHY AND LANGUAGE By Clive Scott ]
This, the second exhibition at Coleman road explores photographic flirtations with historical subject matter.
Titled Boyhood, Edith Bergfors transient, nostalgic images explore the boundaries between boyhood and manhood as expressed by hair. She writes, “In the Renaissance, men who kept their hair long and luxuriant could prolong boyhood while playing the roles of the scholar and the lover. (Greer, 2003)”. In Germaine Greer’s book, The Boy, she examines the role of boyhood, tracing the image of the youthful male subject back through the history of Western art.
Bergfors notes that “The visual influences for the work originate from Renaissance portraiture painting, more precisely, the posture and gaze of the subjects. My models are posed slightly off centre, in a composition that expresses the stillness of portraiture in painting. The portrait of Bindo Altoviti, painted by Raphael, was particularly influential. - (Campbell, 1990) A wealthy banker, Altoviti commissioned this portrait of himself in 1515, and it is suspected that Raphael painted him as he was in his youth, instead of as he had been in his thirty two years of age at the time. (Greer, 2003)”
“My personal interest does not derive from a feminist point of view of wanting to objectify the male subject, but from an interest in this multilateral play between youth, age, sexuality and power.”
Tobias Rose’s piece Autonomous 15:30 takes reference from Harmen Steenwyck’s still life painting “An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life (oil on canvas, 1640)”. Like Steenwyck, Tobias maintains an allegorical relationship toward the depicted objects. Unlike Steenwyck’s message of the 'Vanitas' summarized in the Gospel of Matthew 6:18-21, these objects are the result of personal memories.
The title Autonomous 15:30 is a loose reference to the era from which the aesthetic derives, but more poignantly, a reference to a time of day, at a time in the artists life. The piece requires the sort of “coming to terms” that T.J. Clark talks about in "The Sight of Death - An Experiment in Art Writing”. Inspired by his own experience of looking at two of Poussin’s paintings (Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake and Landscape with a Calm). Clark grapples with the implications of truly comprehending works of art. Writing “I think that much of this is articulated – under the sign of a different set of hopes and understandings, but with the impulse and tempo of the understanding still accessible to those who care to look. “
For those who care to Look, past the connotations of the Dutch still life aesthetic to the “punctum” of the image there is an immediate subversion of visual language, a sexualisation in the emission of a certain type of pleasure.
Where Brian O Doherty writes, in Inside the White Cube of “A cliché of the age being to ejaculate over the space on entering the gallery” Tobias reserves this for the photographic anachronism.
Reuben Leprevost’s work plays with the formalist definition of identity through his re-contextualization of paintings by Constable, Holbein and Claesz.
Leprevost sites Borges essay Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote which dealt with how an identical reproduction varies in reading and effect depending on its time and method of production. Through a process of re-photographing we see a reduction of information that acts as a filter, blocking out the cues on which our interpretation is based, something that makes our reading more difficult and more conscious.
Leprevost writes that “the viewer must read specific cues: spatial, perspectival, and tonal. This is a learned language, a scopic regime developed in painting. - Hand in hand with this, for an object to be correctly identified it must exist within our culturally constructed visual memory.”
Stating that “By re-presenting these objects without the cues by which their reading was guided reflects on this process of interpreting identity with the painting itself, as opposed to the subject it presents, functions as an analogy to the role of knowledge and experience, (as detailed by Gombrich: the Variability of Vision) in our ability to interpret, and identify, the identity of objects.”
Through his awareness of a language developed through classical painting, Leprevost is able to explore how we interpret identity, be it in images or in the everyday. Writing “I feel that the method I have developed functions to make the viewer aware of this process and thus reveal the complexity of our seemingly unmediated perception.”