INCHOATE THOUGHTS
“ABELARDO MORELL: PICTURES IN
PICTURES”
Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York, New
York
September 25 - December 6, 2008
In a photographic world dominated by
the digital, a few artists continue to explore the perceptual and cognitive
consequences of older technologies: Barbara Ess, that of the pinhole camera,
and Abelardo Morell, the camera obscura. Such practitioners are not in thrall
to the would-be monopolists of the computer industry. They remind us that we ourselves
can make at least some of our own equipment with which to explore the creation
of images by the contrived fall of light.
Any
darkened chamber, whether the size of a shoebox or of a room, pierced by a
small aperture—a pin prick or a hole in a blind—hosts a transient image as rays
of light enter and illuminate the walls with an intensity that varies in
accordance with the character and location of their last point of reflection.
Lenses and mirrors can be used to concentrate such images on a flat surface. The
room-sized camera obscura (“dark chamber”), which the viewer enters to observe
the image, was a site of wonder, curiosity, research, and entertainment in
seventeenth and eighteenth-century Europe.
Artists
have long explored the visual peculiarities, such as halation, of camera
obscura images. Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) is among the most celebrated. Morell’s
photographs of the interiors of his makeshift camera obscuras extend a
venerable tradition of art making. Eight such works, seven in color (a new departure),
form the core of this exhibition. Morell, though, is no more a literalist in his
use of the camera obscura than was Vermeer. Both record their observations at a
remove rather than use this technology to compose, let alone create their
images.
The
light Morell admits resolves into striking canonical images: the Pantheon, the
most astounding ancient building to survive intact in Rome, is eerily
reconstituted on a black-and-orange striped day bed and the wall against which
it stands, that of room 111 of the Albergo del Sole al Pantheon. The Salute,
Baldassare Longhena’s votive church completed in Venice in 1681, hovers upside
down on gold and white damask covering a palace bedroom wall on which hangs a rococo
gilt-framed looking glass, its mirrored surface strangely dark. The image of
the Salute is inverted, as are all pure camera obscura images. In some recent
works, Morell has used a prism to render the image right side up, a minor
manipulation that enhances the clarity of dual presence, as in the case of the
Coliseum cast on the wall of room 20 of the Hotel Gladiatori, Rome.
Morell’s
exposures are of between five and ten hours’ duration. By photographing the
camera obscura image as it falls upon the substance and furnishings of the
hotel rooms and unused offices he adapts for the purpose, Morell ironically superimposes
the longevity of the monuments outside on an internal site of transience by
means of light passing through. It leaves as little trace as the guests who lay
their heads on the pillows in anonymous succession, night after night. His is a
quiet art of the first order.