Gelatin Silver Print with Selenium Toner.
Printed 2018.
Image: 14 x 14 in : 35,56 x 35,56 cm. / Paper: 16 x 20 in : 40,64 x 50,80 cm
Signed, dated and editioned in pencil on print verso
Copyright The Artist
There came a point in photography’s long argument with abstraction when the medium realized it could make an X out of almost nothing, two feathered strands crossing against a white sky, and let that be enough. This is such a picture. Two bristling diagonals, pale and frayed at the edges, meet near the upper right in a knot that has gone emphatically dark. Everything else drifts toward the paper’s own whiteness, as if the image were dissolving even as it forms.
What the camera does here is turn description into sign. A garland becomes a letter, a chance crossing becomes the most loaded mark in the alphabet, the X that cancels, marks the spot, stands in for a kiss. Photography has always been good at this slippage between thing and symbol, and this frame stages it plainly. The dark cluster at the join carries all the tonal weight, the feathery ends fraying into fog, refusing to say where the object stops and the atmosphere begins.
That refusal is held by the print itself. It is a gelatin silver photograph toned with selenium in 2018, and the toning is what lets the sheet run from that deep, concentrated black at the crossing to the faintest breath of grey without a visible break. Saula, who founded the gallery that shows it, titles the work with the very mark it depicts, closing the loop between subject and sign. What lingers is not the tinsel but the gesture, a single letter drawn in silver against nothing, and the odd conviction that it means something.
There came a point in photography’s long argument with abstraction when the medium realized it could make an X out of almost nothing, two feathered strands crossing against a white sky, and let that be enough. This is such a picture. Two bristling diagonals, pale and frayed at the edges, meet near the upper right in a knot that has gone emphatically dark. Everything else drifts toward the paper’s own whiteness, as if the image were dissolving even as it forms.
What the camera does here is turn description into sign. A garland becomes a letter, a chance crossing becomes the most loaded mark in the alphabet, the X that cancels, marks the spot, stands in for a kiss. Photography has always been good at this slippage between thing and symbol, and this frame stages it plainly. The dark cluster at the join carries all the tonal weight, the feathery ends fraying into fog, refusing to say where the object stops and the atmosphere begins.
That refusal is held by the print itself. It is a gelatin silver photograph toned with selenium in 2018, and the toning is what lets the sheet run from that deep, concentrated black at the crossing to the faintest breath of grey without a visible break. Saula, who founded the gallery that shows it, titles the work with the very mark it depicts, closing the loop between subject and sign. What lingers is not the tinsel but the gesture, a single letter drawn in silver against nothing, and the odd conviction that it means something.