Category Archives: gallery

High Voltage photography of Dezső Szabó

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I caught photographer Dezső Szabó’s show “High Voltage” just before it closed at Trafó, and I’m glad I didn’t miss it despite being underwhelmed with the images I saw on the internet. In person however, the large-format, square photographs are fantastically evocative and clear compositions.  The staged vacuum around the lightning and the hyper-pigmentation makes you question the source of the image, and the black borders make you doubly aware that it is a photograph being presented as a photograph. Szabó creates his images in a large, enclosed box with many tools and apparatuses that mock the effect of natural phenomena. More images of the photographs and video on Trafó’s website here.

From the exhibition text:

“The artist is obsessively searching for possibilities of creating and re-creating reality with his photos, which are shots made about modelled views, which are constructed with simulational techniques. Dezső Szabó’s images are focusing on the documentary nature of photography, and the photos themselves speak about the modus operandi of the medium.

In order to create this imagery, the artist has been modelling various physical phenomena with the use of smoke machines, water circulators, and pyrotechnics. The latest images were also taken in laboratory conditions with the help of a custom-made Tesla-transformator, which creates electric discharges, which are smaller but similar phenomena as the thunderbolts of summer storms.”

Pistoletto’s “Lavoro” at Luhring Augustine

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Perhaps photographing Michelangelo Pistoletto’s work ought to be considered an art in its own right. In  photos of Pistoletto’s show Lavoro, at Luhring Augustine Gallery through April 28, it is difficult to tell what is part of the artist’s original composition, silkscreened onto mirror, and what is a reflection.

At least that’s the case with my photos. The gallery website provides you with the works sans reflection. But maybe my photos show better what it is like to view the exhibition, and particularly the immersive quality with which Pistoletto draws the viewer and the temporal setting into play with the realistic scenes he creates. The ladies in the background above, and myself below, deserve such a prominent place when looking at and talking about the artist’s work. Pistoletto begins to create them, but the works are complete when placed in a room and viewed by a person. 

Lavoro is Italian for work. The bright colors, hyperrealistic treatment of surfaces, and prosaic tools depicted here relate to the industrial kind of work done in warehouses and on construction sites. 

Pistoletto began painting on mirror as early as the 1960s. (I wrote about Pistoletto’s early work and original mirror paintings here after visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art retrospective in 2010.) His cropped compositions and bold color are different here, looking much more like photographs and much less like the delicate portraits on tissue he used to paint. They look like their respective times in that way.

I especially like the sign here, telling the viewer: “Public forbidden to enter.”
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Off-kilter Occult: Hernan Bas

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I was excited to see that Hernan Bas’s had a new show up at Lehmann Maupin after first seeing his work at their downtown location in 2009. Even if I hadn’t, I would have been a sucker for the Baudelaire quote in the press release; “The loveliest trick of the Devil is to persuade you that he does not exist.” The Miami-born, Detroit-based painter examines lore and legends of the devil in this new group of paintings.

Tartini’s Dream (The Devil’s Trill)
I really enjoy his dense compositions, like the one above where intersecting branches cover every part of the picture plane, as if they are trying to force their way out. His works tend to suggest complex narratives, suggested by the strange landscapes and dramatic little figures as much as their titles.

A Devil’s Bridge
The rainbow of colors used here is representative of his work, and the very bright and light hues he uses manage to seem subsumed into his overall dark composition. I love the figure in the foreground looking out over the water, while a shadowy figure lurks under the bridge behind him. It’s cliche, perhaps, but it exists in a vividly colored and slightly off-kilter alternate world.

Detail, A Devil’s Bridge

Detail, A Devil’s Bridge

Recently in a interview Bas said of his more recent work:

The best way that anyone has described the work so far was in an interview with Maurizio Cattelan titled “Something Off,” which really sums up these thoughts again on how I view the more successful aspects of the work—there’s always something off about them, and I strive towards that off-ness whenever I’m painting. It can come from how I render the figures or skewing the scale; something just always has to be a little wrong. I don’t want to make right painting. 

More from his interview with Art21 here.

A Satanist on a Tuesday

“Occult Contemporary” is up at Lehmann Maupin Gallery in Chelsea through April 21.