The Missing: The Photography of Andrea Frank and Cleverson
Raul Zamudio
Like the positive-negative
dichotomy, my attraction to the photographic work of Andrea Frank and Cleverson
stems from what their work alludes to that draws attention to something absent.
For though they are artists that are engaged in photography and its discourse,
they have arrived at this practice through circuitous routes. What is seen in
their work, then, is not only evidence of individualized photographic strategies,
but also a culmination of artistic endeavors that may not be evident per se.
Both artists were trained in different media than photography: Cleverson was
trained as a sculptor in Brazil, and Frank originally studied painting in Germany.
And these individual sensibilities manifest in their work through a dialectic
of fact and fiction, of the overt and the covert, and of what is captured within
the focus of the lens and what is outside of it.
In Andrea Frank’s
series of works titled Case Study, for example, modernist architecture and its
utopia of social progress become a dystopia of ruins. The building that is the
subject of Case Study originally served as a youth camp during Mussolini’s
fascist Italy. The work simultaneously operates within the field of cinema and
painting: the diptych titled Case Study # 9-10 is cinematic in its panoramic
quality and horizontality. This effect is not unlike watching the arrested frame
of a film, Case Study 9-10 is a photograph that paradoxically captures both dynamism
and stasis. This dichotomy serves well the picture’s context of an atrophic,
sociopolitical experiment in a totalitarian state. Painting not only converges
with the cinematic detected in the interplay between light and shadow, and between
the grid of the window frames that echo the format of the diptych, but the pictorial
is subordinated for implosive ends. These window frames hark back to the Albertian
model of the painting-as-window theorem, ditto for the Albertian window’s
concomitant morph into the modernist grid as well. Both of these disparate tropes,
the Albertian window as well the modernist grid, are reconfigured by Frank as
authoritarian aesthetics. In this sense the picture’s context of fascism
seamlessly fits into the tyranny of both the mimetic and the abstract. But this
work is not only about the politicization of art nor the aestheticization of
politics; Frank’s pictures remind us of a type of absence where the ruins
of an elided past and its denial amount to a type of historical amnesia. It is
reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s assessment that the past cannot be rendered
without a heavy price. Whereas Frank’s focus is on the ruins of a forgotten
era that allude to an effacement of memory, Cleverson’s concern is on the
displacement of the individual in an alienated and alienating world of its own
making.
Cleverson transmits
these qualities through figurative work that relies on representations of a simulated
self, of a subjectivity and its attendant desires and aspirations formed by unconscious
forces molded by external factors. In photographing prosthetics and mannequins,
figuration for Cleverson amounts to what Deleuze called a “body without
organs.” The figures and their truncated, isolated configurations are related
to Hans Bellmer, Robert Gober, the figurative work of Hiroshi Sugimoto and late
Cindy Sherman. Although their lighting and angular photographic composition consisting
of close-ups, diagonals and radical recessions create a melancholic sensibility
of alienation and existential pathos, they extend the aforementioned influences
in myriad directions. Cleverson’s sculptural training pushes the edges of
photography into a corporeal dimension. Yet the overall somatic quality of his
photographs also embody what Roland Barthes called the punctum; that is to say,
that particular thing that arises out of the picture and pierces the viewer.
This subjective affectation, where individuated elements of any picture are able
to permeate into the psyche of the viewer, is what distinguishes Cleverson’s
photography.
Frank’s architectural
imagery and Cleverson’s figurative work conceptually operate somewhere between
the self-evident and the sublime. They emphasize an interstitial state between
fixidity and transience, between being and nothingness. Psychoanalytically speaking,
then, the photography of Andrea Frank and Cleverson are mirroring back to us
what we lack, what has been severed; in short, what is missing.
