MARCO BREUER | Nature of the Pencil - Snapshots review

Sugimoto and Breuer in Chelsea

Posted by Jean Dykstra on November 19, 2010

"Two of the most interesting photography shows in Chelsea at the moment have as much to do with drawing as they do with photography. Hiroshi Sugimoto at Pace Gallery and Marco Breuer at Von Lintel are both showing cameraless images made by 'drawing" on photographic paper. Yet both bodies of work also have direct roots back to Henry Fox Talbot, inventor, polymath, and pioneer in the medium of photography. ...

Von Lintel Gallery terms Marco Breuer's show, Nature of the Pencil, on view through December 4, "a drawing installation," but his title is a play on Fox Talbot’s seminal book, The Pencil of Nature, and it explores the intersection of drawing and photography. This has been Breuer’s longtime subject and he continues to explore the idea of mark-making, without camera or film, through destruction and decay, using various chemical or physical processes. In previous works, Breuer, who has been called a "process photographer," has shot at photographic paper and set off small explosions over it, among other things. Here, too, the chromogenic paper, or color reversal paper, has been scraped and scratched, leaving weirdly luminous abstractions. The individual works are mounted on walls that appear to be blackboards, with titles notated in chalk as well as erased remnants of notes left barely visible, suggesting an experimenter at work. Experimentation, in fact, is the driving force behind both of these shows by artists who are not constrained by definitions of what photography should be."

Read full review @ Snapshots