PHOTO:Thomas Brummett-Of Earth, Heaven & Light
Thomas Brummett stands for the unification of two essentially diametrically opposed approaches. On the one hand, he creates enlarged, detailed shots in the style of the realistic photography associated with the Straight Photography movement. Yet instead of clarity, the result is openness, images that could have been culled from dreams or appeal to the unconscious. On the other, he works in the painterly idiom of the Pictorialists without a clear focus and yet does not seek to imitate painting or any other medium for that matter.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Galerie Karsten Greve Archive
The solo exhibition “Of Earth, Heaven, and Light” at Galerie Karsten Greve, presents a selection of 40 works from Thomas Brummett’s series “Light Projections” and “Infinities”. The works of Thomas Brummett have a strangely old-worldly feel to them. After manually processing the prints the artist digitalizes and then reproduces them, among other things, using an Iris printer. This contradictory combination of the traditional and the very new applies not only to the manufacturing process but is also what makes Brummett’s oeuvre so catching, that irritating and yet inescapable sense of seeing something strange and yet familiar. “I lure the viewer in with a 19th Century “look“ but the more one looks the more one does not know quite where they are. These images are a type of visual trap…” In his series “Light Projections” (2013) that have been awarded the prestigious World Photography award for Conceptual Photography (2014) the artist controlled the bokeh. Bokeh is the quality of out-of-focus or “blurry” parts of the image rendered by a camera lens, it is not the blur itself or the amount of blur in the foreground or the background of a subject. Bokeh is rendered by the lens, not the camera. Different lenses render bokeh differently due to unique optical designs. The series “Infinities (of Earth and Heaven)” (2013-16), is described by Thomas Brummett as: “All of my work is about process, looking at things very closely, the marks I can generate with the silver metals in black and white photo paper and especially exploring the spaces “between” photography and mark making. My work has had a great deal to do with manipulating the photographic surface and this series is just an extension of that exploration”. Brummett used images of outer space taken by the Hubble Space Telescope that NASA makes available to the public. Starting with one of these photos, the artist worked like a printmaker and manipulated the image, desaturating the hue and layering the image with other patterns, all of which he has photographed from nature. The layers include images of stars, magnolia trees, a recording of snowflakes hitting a scanner, as well as real dust and mold from the artist’s studio.
Info: Galerie Karsten Greve, 5, rue Debelleyme, Paris, Duration 5/11/16-14/1/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-19:00, www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
