Doubling and Cutting: AJ Nadel – by Erica Snow

Doubling and Cutting: AJ Nadel

by Erica Snow

 

AJ Nadel, in his recent drawings and prints, doubles and manipulates imagery. The activity, though, is not arbitrary or wanton as is born out by the two distinct processes pursued in recent works. Before investigating how the work functions as art it is helpful to go through these processes. The first type of work results in prints made from transfers from Polaroids. The works start from a series of photographs taken by Nadel of a young woman. The portraits all have the straightforward formality of a Department of Motor Vehicles ID photo.

Each of these portraits is then rephotographed as a Polaroid that is used as a source for a monoprint transfer onto a piece of archival paper. The monoprints are not copies of the photographic image: each is manipulated in the printing process so that different areas of each of the Polaroid sources are emphasized in each of the prints. The next part of the process requires that the Polaroid photograph itself be boiled so that a thin translucent skin (which in each case contains the complete image) separates from the paper. This skin is then placed over the printed image and creates a doubling of the image. But because the image is not evenly printed and because the skin is manipulated, bunched up here cut with small scissors there, the doubling takes a more expressionistic than literal form. Further, Nadel will on occasion put the skin of one Polaroid over the print of another. That the photograph is of the same woman but isn’t the same photograph creates a false doubling. Once the process is completed the works are not further manipulated by being drawn over or colored. Digital scans of the works, though, are used to create prints on cloth that are much larger than the original monoprint.

The second series of works also involve types of printing and copying and doubling. But here the artist’s hand is present through the more traditional activities of drawing and painting. One work seems to depict two nude figures sitting on a couch together. Here the image has been cobbled together, collaged, from photographs that Nadel has taken of himself and another model. The image was then photocopied before Nadel worked into the piece with Whiteout and ink. With this process of drawing Nadel takes the collaged image of two clothed figures and removes the figures’ clothing to create two nude figures. In the final image, due to the distortions and shadow images created by the copying and drawing process, the viewer is left with the impression that, like in the first series, there were two nude figures on a couch that had been photographed.

AJ Nadel’s processes of duplicating and manipulating, and the particular aspects of each process, quickly raise questions. Looking at previous work of Nadel’s where images from pop culture have been distorted and manipulated it is easy to notice that in these recent works he has insisted on using photographs that he himself has taken. Yet like the endlessly repeated images in magazines these images, particularly the first series of portraits, are equally impersonal. The same holds true for the double nude portrait when it is confirmed that the intimacy between the two figures–emphasized by their nudity and, falsely suggested, body language–never existed.

The cuts made into the skins of the Polaroid seem at first incidental. But when the images are blown up into their final printed version it is clear that carefully considered abstract shapes have been cut out. The information that Nadel, in his other profession as a surgeon, would use similar scissors and cuts to perform retinal operations may be useful here. Years of training and practice have allowed Nadel to develop a facility for the small delicate cut that the lay person cannot even begin to understand. The question arises as to whether this facility is visible in the cuts in the skins of the Polaroid, or the larger prints from it, which the viewer sees in the final works.

It is the cut for Nadel that is the personal. The image itself, whether he takes it or removes from a popular culture source, is the raw impersonal clay of creation. His two series begin to merge conceptually. Andy Warhol famously misaligned his silk-screens. He spoke of this as being a result of a lack of facility or as a result of having whoever was hanging out at his studio do his work whether they were trained or not. Of course it is exactly the mistakes in Warhol’s prints–the colors off register (lip gloss encroaching on the nose), imprecise, shadowy doublings of images–that make his work at once a glorification of and a response to the hegemony of mundane repetition.

Nadel himself partakes in being both respectful of the power of the mechanical reproduction and responding to the need to personalize the impersonal source. He does not draw on the Polaroid monoprints/collages–the hues and pigmented lines of the source material are left unaltered–yet they are physically pushed around, cut. Pablo Picasso created thousands upon thousands of works about the same subjects. Artist and model are rendered again and again. The viewer has learned that with Picasso it is not the story of the depicted artist and model that starts the discussion anew each time; it is the cut of the line. The unique consideration of each line becomes a new point of entry into discussions of human history and experience and their representation. Nadel’s actual cuts, along with the other aspects of his technique, are a means to re-explore the aesthetics and narratives of figurative depiction–and the viewer too can learn to read these unusual and resonant invitations to a conversation.