Recently by Greg Afinogenov
A. R. Penck
Musee d'Art moderne de la Ville de Paris
14 February – 11 May 2008
Ralf Winkler took his pseudonym, A. R. Penck, from the early twentieth-century geologist Albrecht Penck, an expert on the Ice Age. It was not an accidental choice: geology and "stored information," the artist says, have a certain affinity — and information is one of his most fundamental preoccupations. Penck is as much cyberneticist as painter. An elaborately conceived symbolic alphabet appears both directly and allegorically throughout his work, and his artistic project is constantly informed by the need to work through the implications of language, symbolic systems, communicative abstraction (thus, until the late '70s, Penck often accompanied his projects with theoretical texts).
Yet despite this very modern awareness of systems theory, his work consistently recalls the Ice Age in another way. Penck's artworks are not just vaguely primitivist: they are self-conscious evocations of the most ancient art. Penck sees his project as a "recourse to archeology," as "clearing a path through all of art history back to the cave paintings." This dialectical confrontation between the old and the new gives his painting a compelling, and unusual, pathos. The French sociologist Edgar Morin once described civilization as a passage from the problem of the caveman to the problem of the caves within man. Penck aims to attack both problems at once.
"I hope that these views appear to the spectator as they did to me — with a certain coldness."- Candida Höfer
Candida Höfer: Paris Series
8 March - 5 April 2008
Yvon Lambert Paris - 108 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris
The first thing that strikes the viewer about Candida Höfer's photographs is not their technical perfection, which is indubitable, but their sameness. Nearly all are of large, rectangular rooms, taken from the dead center of one of the shorter sides; in most, the light source is a skylight or a row of windows on the left-hand side. Human beings and their personal effects are nowhere to be found. The places depicted include some of Paris' most sumptuous Baroque interiors, yet the Bibliotheque Mazarine comes to look like Fontainebleau, the Bibliotheque du Senat like Versailles — as if the living details of each were an irrelevant and superficial skin over a fixed, immutable framework. In the accompanying video commentary, Höfer notes that she only shoots inside because "exterior spaces offer too many possibilities." Unsurprising.
For me, the most vivid counterpart and contrast to Höfer's work is that of the French Revolutionary artist Hubert Robert (1733-1808). Like Höfer, Robert emphasizes the grandeur of human-made spaces — yet his paintings lack the stillness and serenity of Höfer's photographs. He paints almost nothing but ruins: the destruction of bridges, the perishing in fire of great buildings, the crumbling hulks of vaguely classical temples. Perhaps his most famous work is an imagined scene of the Grand Gallery of the Louvre in ruins, the vaulted ceiling caved in, a cooking fire where statues once stood. Robert's subjects, both the ruins themselves and the people that inhabit them, are presented in their utmost vulnerability to history; like Robert himself, they live in a world constantly overshadowed by historical rupture, where even the solidity of stone is no guarantee of permanence.
