PHOTO:Florian Maier–Aichen,The Limits of Control
Florian Maier-Aichen is a landscape photographer, whose images are created using a combination of computer editing and traditional photographic techniques. The photographer alters vast landscape compositions with a range of staged effects, such as double exposures and light leaks, and computer and hand adjustments in addition. His painterly landscapes reminiscent early photography and German Romantic paintings.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Blum & Poe Gallery Archive
In a dozen new pictures, Florian Maier-Aichen in his solo exhibition, “The Limits of Control”, takes on waterfalls, ocean views, and the golden hour as cultural clichés, mass media reproductions, and universal sites of desire. Maier-Aichen’s project has sought to expand photography as a field of experimentation and invention, re-enactment and idealization. By combining the actions of picture-taking and picture-making, the artist extends the limits of the medium in his search for the sublime. This search comes at a time when the printed photograph has lost much of its mystery and excitement in a digital image-saturated world. Allowing for chance and error returns the photograph to its early connection to alchemy. At a moment in history when the medium of film itself is on the edge of mere existence, it’s also on the precipice of a widely-expanded field. The evolution of photography from elitist craft to democratic mass tool has opened up its range and possibilities, as well as broadened its audience. Maier-Aichen re-inserts the physical and sensual input between subject and nature, adding time and tactility. Photographs of waterfalls at Yosemite quote early images of these national monuments by 19th Century photographers Carleton Watkins and George Fiske. These photographers, and others, tell the early history of photography in order to both discover and reveal the unknown American West. Maier-Aichen’s works are precisely measured re-creations—like his forebears, made after the long trek to the site during waterfall season, with 8×10 camera and film materials in tow. In “Watercolor, 300 Feet” (2018), Maier-Aichen stands in a water cloud, allowing the film and camera to get soaked with water spray during the shoot. The physical element of water from the site of image-making, then comes to define the surface color and texture. Interacting in this up-close way with the waterfall, the artist looks at the image as a “detail” of the original Watkins and Fiske documents, acting as a dramatization, or a massive, swift brush stroke. Maier-Aichen’s California sunsets pulsate with drama and seduction. The images are slow, vibrant and revealing, made with three long exposures in R, G, B. The nearly-obsolete tri-color process attempts to absorb as much color as possible, dependent on light and patience. The photographs encapsulate the in-person, durational experience of the golden hour. Taken from a parking lot, a roadside lookout, or the roof of the artist’s house, the work epitomizes the practical reason why Los Angeles is the natural entertainment and image capital of the world. Landscape vistas and locations are within driving range around the city, a handful of these beloved sites are easily accessible and used in a majority of film production, versatile backgrounds used to tell an array of stories. The Los Angeles sun provides eternal favorable lighting, with bright and theatrical twilights, turning landscape into perfectly-lit product for the camera. The rainbow skies also nod to the great optimism and romantic promise of the American West. Sunsets are also universal subjects for everyone, on every social media page, a photogenic cliché. In Maier-Aichen’s pictures, the sunset is fully-loaded, an ersatz paradise that acknowledges its own artifice. The “Lasso paintings”, named after the Photoshop tool, are another disrupted sunset. The hybrid photograph-paintings begin as a basic gradient in Photoshop, and then the software’s lasso and various brush tools are used to overwrite information, thus killing the original image. The artist uses the tool to emphasize the flatness of each layer, playing with ideas around the unique gesture and photography’s new, expanded palette, as well as the icon of the cowboy in the American West, swinging his “lasso” in the birthplace of early photography. Conventional tools once intended for “clean-up” become tools of image-making and transformation. With Maier-Aichen’s act of defiance, these tools write playful, absurdist commentary on the field’s new infinite dimensions, making delirious fun of their real-life implications to mask truth and propose perfection. “Chemigrams” are unique, camera-less photographs made like a pour painting with darkroom chemicals. A selection of chemigrams from the artist’s archives, made in the 1990s and 2000s, have been revisited, altered, inverted, solarized, and manipulated into new works. As an ultimate counter-point to the extremely artificial Photoshop gradient paintings, the “Chemigrams” reflect 19th Century imagery and process that revisit the very nature of the medium at a moment when photography was akin to alchemy, unpredictable and impossible to control.
Info: Blum & Poe Gallery, 2727 S. La Cienega Boulevard, Los Angeles, Duration: 1/6-6/7/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.blumandpoe.com
