Marco Breuer, Condition @Von Lintel

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 works, framed in white and unmatted, and hung against white walls in the single room gallery space. All of the works are made of chromogenic paper, which has been alternately exposed, folded, scratched, scraped and burned. Physical dimensions range from roughly 10x8 to 39x29, and each work is unique. All of the works are dated 2012. A small catalog of the exhibition is available from the gallery. (Installation shots at right, along with two up-close detail images.)

Comments/Context: Photography and drawing are two disciplines that don't seem, at first glance, to have much natural affinity for each other. While some photographers have experimented with long exposures to "draw" with light (using flashlights, candles or even lasers) and others have manipulated darkroom chemicals to produce handmade gestural effects, for the most part, these artistic methods have generally tended to stay separate. There is something intrinsically expressive and immediate about putting pen or pencil to paper that the multi-step mechanical process of photography wasn't really designed for.
.
Marco Breuer is one of the few photographers who has consistently tried to make these two artistic circles overlap, merging the light sensitivity and chemical processes of photography with the physicality of direct interaction with the paper of drawing, via countless unexpectedly ingenious methods over the years. His newest works find him tinkering with electric hot plates and frying pans, which he has uncoiled and straightened out into magic wands that glow with intense heat. Using these makeshift tools like a conductor's baton or a calligrapher's brush, he has mixed hand-drawn motion with the effects of heat and light on photographic paper to create works that explore interlocking layers of line, texture, and color.

The two up-close image fragments at left and right provide samples of how Breuer has used the wands to interact with the paper. Horizontal and vertical lines are etched and burned into the surface (sometimes after a step of folding the paper into grids of rectangles), while light from the orange heat turns some of the backgrounds a bright, shifting, swimming pool blue. The movement is often all-over expressive and passionate (almost manic in some cases), then receding to something more subtle, dispersed and melancholy. Burn marks, cat scratches, and thin scars create a spectrum of chance colors when interacting with the chemical coated papers: yellows and browns give way to misty light blues and wispy greys, with splashes of vibrant red or purple scraped away like a Richter squeegee. A few add another layer of colored exposure, an unexpected hint of green underneath the jittering lines.

Breuer's unconventional methods bring rough physicality back to photography, where the final image object shows the literal signs of its making. These abstract works have a sense of touch, of surface topography, of finger driven carving. Overall, I was impressed by the innovative originality in the range of elegance and complexity in these works, and Breuer has clearly shown once again that the idea of merging photography and drawing is altogether less improbable and foolhardy than we might have assumed.

Collector's POV: The works in this show are priced between $5500 and $19500, based on size, and many were already sold when I visited the show. Breuer's work has very little secondary market history, so gallery retail is still the best option for those collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Interview: Artlog (here)

Marco Breuer, Condition
Through June 23rd

Von Lintel Gallery
520 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

Marco Breuer, Nature of the Pencil @Von Lintel

JTF (just the facts): A total of 16 works, framed in white and unmatted, and hung in the single room gallery. The gallery space has been painted with a thick band of dark grey chalkboard paint. The prints have been hung against this background, and Breuer has added (and subsequently erased in some cases) various notations in chalk. A pair of photocopied images have also been taped to the wall. The unique chromogenic prints come in various sizes, from roughly 9x7 to 24x20, and were all made in 2009 or 2010. (Installation shots at right, via Von Lintel.)

Comments/Context: Marco Breuer's last show at Von Lintel (roughly a year and a half ago, here) was hung in a generally conventional manner: framed images were placed at eye level against the white walls of the gallery. The installation focused the viewer's attention on the finished product, object quality of the artworks, and on the underlying physical processes that were used to create their abstract colors and patterns.

Fast forward to Breuer's newest show, and something altogether different is going on. The artist is still hard at work in the darkroom, taking light sensitive papers and experimenting with a dizzying array of loosely controlled scrapes, scratches, and cuts, searching for new visual outcomes. What's new this time around is that Breuer has installed the recent pictures in a way that invites us into his brain, to watch as he improvises and iterates on ideas. In many ways, it is almost an exhibition of the remnants of a cerebral performance piece more than it is an exhibition of photographs.

Each image or set of images has a series of cryptic annotations written in chalk near the framed works. The analytical, puzzle solver in me felt challenged to figure out what each one meant. Were they dimensions? Or commentary? Or symbolic references? 4.6.6 is scrawled above one of the pastel, geometric abstractions. I stood for a few moments before I figured it out: 4 lines, 6 colors, 6 shapes. Under a spider web of scratchings are images of a light bulbs with strike through slashes. Aha, these works were made by scratching the paper with a piece of glass, trying to find the approximate center of the paper, completely in the dark. As you walk around the room, there is a distinct sense of intellectual art in progress, of process being figured out along the way, with a little help from both chance and craft.

I found the images of vibrant blue and yellow, almost like folded, interrupted waves across the surface of the paper, to be the most visually compelling; they really stick out from far away. The others require a more intimate look: tiny lines that shuttle and wiggle across the image as though they were raked by an array of manic seismograph needles. What I liked best, however, was the exposition of Breuer's thoughts, the ability to see how he makes aesthetic connections. The unconventional installation gives the artworks a more personal grounding and backstory, opening up an unusual opportunity for the viewer to appreciate the thinking that has gone on.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $5900 and $12500, based on size. (In fact, I was told that there is a mathematical equation for pricing, based on a price per square inch.) Breuer's work has very little secondary market history, gallery retail remains the best option for collectors interested in following up.

Rating: * (one star) GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Review: New Yorker (here)
• Upcoming Talk @SVA, November 16th (here)
• Exhibition: New Pictures 2 @Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 2010 (here)

Marco Breuer, Nature of the Pencil

Through December 4th

Von Lintel Gallery
520 West 23rd Street
New York, NY 10011

Marco Breuer, Part _ of _ Parts @Von Lintel

JTF (just the facts): A total of 21 works, framed in white and unmatted, hung in the single room gallery. The unique prints come in various sizes, from 5x4 to 38x28, and were all made in 2008 or 2009. Several different papers and processes have been used, resulting in cyanotype, gelatin silver, Polaroid and chromogenic prints. (Installation shots at right.)

Comments/Context: Likely due to its technological origins, of all the artistic mediums, photography is the one most deeply rooted in process. It seems we can hardly look at an image these days without immediately transitioning to questions about what kind/size of camera was used, which printing process was chosen and what type of manipulations might have gone on in the darkroom or computer. It's often easy to get lost in the details of "how", missing the more important questions of "what" and "why".

Marco Breuer has been exploring the depths and edges of photography processes for over a decade, and his show of new work at Von Lintel continues this investigation with satisfying and elegant results. Breuer uses no camera; he takes various kinds of light sensitive papers and submits them to a wide array of unconventional treatments, generating abstract works that record the results of these experiments.

This type of approach has its roots back in the scientific cyanotypes of the 19th century, early 20th century X-rays, and the Surrealist/Dada photograms of Christian Schad, Man Ray, and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy of 1920s. The difference is that in all of those examples, the paper captured an image of an object (or group of objects), often carefully and artfully composed to create the compositional effect the artist desired. In Breuer's case, his paper is capturing the remnants of a process or movement, not the shadow of a physical form; the papers are scraped, shot, spun, drilled, and exposed to light, leaving behind their reactions, scratches, abrasions, and fogs of color. As such, they seem more directly related to the ideas of random chance embedded in the works of John Cage or Merce Cunningham; Breuer's prints examine the outcomes of processes that could have gone in any number of uncontrolled directions.

.

The works themselves are patterns of spots, waves, squiggles and circular spins, intermixed with heat generated fades and gradients of yellow, orange and black. Beyond the colors and designs on the surface, many of the prints are visibly punctured and scratched by gun shots, drills or the motion of a turntable, enhancing their object quality (and drawing parallels to a diverse set of other art, from Lucio Fontana's slashed canvases to Damien Hirst's spin paintings). Overall, I found most of these abstractions to be both thought-provoking as ideas and successful as variations of line and form.

Collector's POV: The prints in this show are priced between $3900 and $14900, generally based on size. Breuer's work has not appeared at auction with any regularity, so no pricing pattern can be readily discerned. Seeing these prints, I was most reminded of Harry Callahan's light drawings from the 1940s, and Breuer's new works would certainly complement a set of those photographs quite well. More generally, while Breuer's images don't fit into our collecting framework, I found these prints to have a unique voice and point of view, clearly working outside the well traveled roads of contemporary photography, but still finding novel ways to make original and exciting images.

Rating: ** (two stars) VERY GOOD (rating system described here)

Transit Hub:

• Early Recordings, Aperture monograph (here)
• Breuer holdings at MoMA (here)
• Vince Aletti review, Village Voice 2000 (here)

Marco Breuer, Part _ of _ Parts

Through June 13th

Von Lintel Gallery

520 West 23rd Street

New York, NY 10011