Abelardo Morell.
Gaskell, Ivan
Bonni Benrubi Gallery | New York, New York
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In a photographic world dominated by the digital, a few artists
continue to explore the perceptual and cognitive consequences of older
technologies: Barbara Ess, for instance, works with the pinhole camera,
and Abelardo Morell the camera obscura. Such practitioners are not in
thrall to the would-be monopolists of the computer industry. They remind
us that we ourselves can make at least some of our own equipment with
which to explore the creation of images by the contrived fall of light.
Any darkened chamber, whether the size of a shoebox or of a room,
pierced by a small aperture--a pinprick or hole in a blind--hosts a
transient image as rays of light enter and illuminate the walls with an
intensity that varies in accordance with the character and location of
their last point of reflection. Lenses and mirrors can be used to
concentrate such images on a flat surface. The room-sized camera obscura
("dark chamber"), which the viewer enters to observe the
image, was a site of wonder, curiosity, research and entertainment in
seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe.
Artists have long explored the visual peculiarities, such as
halation, of camera obscura images. Johannes Vermeer (1632-75) is among
the most celebrated. Morell's photographs of the interiors of his
makeshift camera obscuras extend a venerable tradition of art making.
Eight such works, seven in color (a new departure), form the core of
"Abelardo Morell: Pictures in Pictures" (through December 6,
2008). Morell, though, is no more a literalist in his use of the camera
obscura than was Vermeer. Both record their observations at a remove
rather than use this technology to compose, let alone create, their
images.
The light Morell admits resolves into striking canonical images:
the Pantheon, the most astounding ancient building to survive intact in
Rome, is eerily reconstituted on a black-and-orange striped daybed and
the wall against which it stands, located in Room 111 of the Hotel
Albergo del Sole. Santa Maria della Salute, Baldassare Longhena's
votive church completed in Venice in 1681, hovers upside down on gold
and white damask covering a palace bedroom wall on which hangs a rococo
gilt-framed looking glass, its mirrored surface strangely dark. The
image of the Salute is inverted, as are all pure camera obscura images.
In some recent works, Morell has used a prism to render the image right
side up, a minor manipulation that enhances the clarity of dual
presence, as in the case of the Coliseum cast on the wall of Room 20 of
the Hotel Gladiatori in Rome.
The duration of Morell's exposures is between five to ten
hours. By photographing the camera obscura image as it falls upon the
substance and furnishings of the hotel rooms and unused offices he
adapts for the purpose, Morell ironically superimposes the longevity of
the monuments outside on an internal site of transience by means of
light passing through. It leaves as little trace as the guests who lay
their heads on the pillows in anonymous succession, night after night.
His is a quiet art of the first order.
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