LE RETOUR

The title of the exhibition which focuses on contemporary artists experimenting with photograms, comes directly from Man Ray’s 3 minute film Le Retour à la Raison (1923) in which he applied and extended the principles of the photogram to a moving image, particularly in the first sequences.

Markus Amm, Walead Beshty. Liz Deschenes and Nathan Hylden are some among several artists working today in photography who have been engaged in this early twentieth century technique. The return to the photogram partly refers to some of the constants here –the absence of the camera, film, the element of action, the self-reflexive aspect and chance-but what is distilled on the photographic paper produces vastly different visual and conceptual fields.

Walead Beshty’s large scale hand processed photogram from a series made in 2006 relies on the effect of light and chemicals on silver gelatin paper. The textured surface of the work is both a consequence of the crumpled paper used as the means to cover, expose and register as well as the subsequent crumpling of the print. The emphasis on materiality notwithstanding, Beshty’s picture is also performative demonstrating an indivisible mobility, to borrow the words used by Henri Bergson to define his theory of Duration. Time, mobility, chance and self-referentiality are further explored in Fedex First Overnight Box, New York-Berlin in which the artist made and packed a glass box the exact dimensions of a large Fed Ex box and shipped it from his gallery in New York to the gallery in Berlin.

Photograms are presented in series that act as formal exercises in the case of Markus Amm. Representing just one aspect of his work-being engaged in various media including sculpture and painting-Amm’s minimal monotypic script takes issue with the possibilities of abstraction in photography. The exclusion of the apparatus forces photography to abscond with a few painting attributes. However, whatever the semblance might be (physicality, uniqueness) they operate within a space both strict and accidental.

Nathan Hylden’s photograms are less about materiality and chance- like his sculptures and paintings they negotiate flatness, positive and negative space; the patterns seem prefigured and geometric, slightly evoking mid Neolithic Greek pottery decorations - they also come across as authentic proto-copying machine print-outs.

Of all the artists in Le Retour, Liz Deschenes is the one whose artistic practice, as she says, “has been completely immersed in the photographic medium”. The Photographs which she is showing here, “are silver toned black and white photographs with no imagery or content. They look and function similarly to mirrors. Daguerreotypes, one of the initial photographic processes, are often referred to as mirrors with a memory. These photographs share the uniqueness of daguerreotypes, the silver reflectivity, and the mercurial viewing experience. The viewer activates the work, and becomes an integral part of a temporal, unrecorded representation

LE RETOUR
Markus Amm, Walead Beshty, Liz Deschenes, Nathan Hylden