Tonal Range: An Approach

“Alluding to familiar objects and scenes without revealing them, they leave us in a middle place, suspended between abstraction and representation.”

Augustus Nazzaro, “UAV Predator Drone Campaign (Approach)”, 2011, 12×16, Acrylic and sumi ink on panel. Courtesy of the artist.

Tonal Range: An Approach
Jordana Zeldin

In his mid-20th century book, Art and Visual Perception, German art and film theorist, Rudolph Arnheim, calls for us to re-focus our attention on the “virtues of vision.” In a world where “concept is [increasingly] divorced from precept,” he urges us to re-establish the connection to our innate “gift of comprehending things through the senses,” to that moment of primal response. Perhaps we can even learn to feel at home in this perceptual place, to resist the urge to “seek refuge in the more familiar medium of words.”1

We have brought together the monochromatic works of Liam Holding, Wayne Liu, Augustus Nazzaro and Shimpei Takeda as an exercise in the kind of sensory engagement Arnheim speaks of. In their endeavor to most effectively explore issues of perception, representation and disclosure, all four artists have reduced their works to the fundamental building blocks of visual communication. With nothing overtly representational to refer to, elemental shapes and lines and variations of light and dark become our anchors, forcing us to face the works with our visual faculties.

Shimpei Takeda’s “Saltscapes” recall the surface of the moon or the ocean as seen from above, natural topographies that are bigger than us, though many of his photograms are no larger than a drugstore print. These works are both the most directly representational works featured here and also the most abstract. Though they bring to mind organic shapes and surfaces, they are actually documents of the chemical reaction that takes place when Takeda sprinkles water and salt onto photosensitive paper, and exposes it to a flash of light. Even as he continues to refine his technique, chance is the chief player in the development of Takeda’s work. It allows us to share with him the delight in the revelation of the “otherwise unseen interaction between materials and light.”2

We move from Takeda’s chemical terrains to Liam Holding’s monoprints of interior spaces. While his colorless palette is a deliberate reference to traditional black and white photography, his technique keeps the medium’s mimetic knack safely at bay. Precision begins and ends at his careful framing of interior scenes with a convex glass viewfinder and gives way to gestural strokes made with rough, inexact tools. He renders patches of light by squeegeeing away excess ink from his copper plates and wood panels. It’s a process of reducing what he sees to bare essentials, an exploration of the question: what is the minimum amount of visual information we need in order register these rudimentary shapes as objects familiar to us from our daily lives?

Whereas Liam Holding begins with a crisp image seen through ground glass, Augustus Nazzaro’s paintings echo the clandestine, muddy nature of his source material: video stills of secret compounds and meetings taking place thousands of feet below the military aircraft cameras that capture them. Through the murky darkness of his images, we are able to make out ‘something’, but are denied access to a complete picture. Thick black lines act as barriers to our seeing more, while his process of layering and removing paint gives strange presence to that which we do not see. His works force us to accept the limitations they impose on our perception. Like his secret scenes, they never fully reveal themselves to us.

Photographer Wayne Liu has referred to the act of taking a picture as “sketching.” As the word implies, there’s a looseness to his images that keeps the viewer from feeling locked into them. The expired papers and chemicals with which he creates his prints make them feel like objects of the past, a dream or a memory. Not clearly rooted in time or even place, his photographs become less like photo-documents as they do visual cues.

All four artists make use of photographic techniques or draw upon photo and video images as source materials, yet are careful to resist the medium’s representational “seduction.”3 Holding does so with rough tools and gestural technique, Takeda’s process is chancy, Liu’s photographs, loose, while the strength of Nazzaro’s paintings come from that which he keeps hidden from us. They are works about sight that ask us to receive them with “indiluted vision.”4 Alluding to familiar objects and scenes without revealing them, they leave us in a middle place, suspended between abstraction and representation.

“Tonal Range” will be on view from September 22 – November 24, 2011 at the ArtBridge Drawing Room. Opening Reception: Thursday, September 22 , 6-8PM. Location: 526 W. 26th Street (between 10th and 11th aves) Studio 502a