Gregory Crewdson, An Eclipse of Moths, Galerie Templon

Gregory Crewdson, Redemption Center, 2018-2019

On day one of the lockdown light as it was labelled by the French government, the French protested and I went to look at art. My first stop was Galerie Templon's new space on the rue du Grenier Saint-Lazare to see the Gregory Crewdson exhibition. These sixteen new works by one of America's most interesting contemporary photographers are troubling and confounding thanks to the images' representation a horrifying view of America. Learning more about Crewdson's process brings relief. We learn that the photographs are obsessively staged images floating somewhere between a surreal fantasy, a horror film and the harsh reality of contemporary America. In other words, there is no place that looks like the one in the photographs.

Gregory Crewdson, The Taxi Depot, 2018-2019

Each image contains at least two people, usually stopped in the middle of an action, each separated from the others, isolated. Crewdson's production process of composing multiple exposures produces human figures whose bodies are exposed, both physically and emotionally. Their skin looks like wax and their situation is distressing. Often the fact that they stand still adds to the sense that they are more like zombies than people. In one of the rare moments of human life found in these photographs, a young man on a verandah holds a baby's bottle of milk, staring into the distance. At the bottom of the stairs leading to the road below, a pram that, like every other object in Crewdson 's photographs, could have been sitting there for decades. Nothing looks as though it was recently used or is usable and yet, in the middle of it all, a baby is alive. 

Gregory Crewdson, The Cobra, 2018-2019

The figures are always suspended in worlds that cannot nurture them, a carpark with old furniture, an industrial lot, a street blocked by a fallen light post, a dilapidated back lot filled with concrete slabs, a fallen tree, cast off rubber tyres. Within spaces littered with the refuse of another era, the people seem to be caught in the middle of activities that make no sense - young boys asleep on an old mattress in the middle of an old driveway surrounded by the puddles of yesterday's rain. A woman looking at an ambulance stretcher in the middle of a clearing, another sitting in a wheelchair on a dirt driveway, an old juke box ten feet away. Each person, like the surrounding objects, has been very carefully placed on the "set," that tells of a story on pause. We keep wondering what just happened? why are they there? what's going to become of them in this hostile environment? And, of course, this is America in 2020. Again and again, signs of sickness populate the frame: the ambulance stretcher, but also a woman's leg gouged out, a man on crutches, others lying down. it is a world of disease in all its various meanings

Gregory Crewdson, Red Star Express, 2018-2019

It is not only what is in the photographs that makes them unsettling, even troubling. The view presented is impossible. The angle from which the scene is photographed is always slightly elevated, as though the viewer is  being invited to swoop down onto the scene. But yet, we are suspended above this world that has been stopped in its tracks. The aspect ratio of the photographs is also unusual, closer to that of widescreeen cinema than to the traditional formats of photography. I found myself discovering the images laterally, walking across them, searching for clues of a trace of life that I might have missed. I felt as though I was trying to find a way out of this surreal nightmare that is rural America. But there is no way out.

Gregory Crewdson, Cherry Street, 2018-2019

In keeping with - or perhaps in contradistinction to - the cinematicity of the Twin Peaks-ike world of the town in the photographs, it is geographically and historically isolated, out of time and place. It is not just that the action has been stopped by the projectionist. From what we see in the photographs the town has stopped in time. This, despite the fact that there is a keen sense of repetition, the same place used over again in different images, from a new perspective. Every object is stopped in historical time; the containers have been uncoupled from truck engines and they sit, idle, one in flames, while young boys wander across a road in the foreground. Geographically, we see hills in the background, but there is no sense of a world outside of this timeless nightmare.

The title, An Eclipse of Moths, is curious for a series of works in which there is very little sign of life. We think of moths as swarming around an artificial light, in order to expose their wings, even if it is only on the way to their death. In Crewdson's photographs, there is no buzzing, let alone urgency of any kind.

Gregory Crewdson, Funeral Back Lot, 2018-2019

A street sign in the photograph with the man and the child's pram spells A L O N E. We can still see the erased M. A L O N E is nevertheless the message that I get when looking at these photographs. Everyone is alone - isolated from others in the spaces they occupy, like the times we live in, the narratives we inhabit. In addition, the sense of isolation from the rest of the world, of being left alone to fight on for one's life in a world that cannot and does not attempt to nourish, is a familiar state of affairs

Robert Rauschenberg, Nightshades and Phantoms @ Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

Robert Rauschenberg, Purr (Night Shade), 1991

Robert Rauschenberg did a lot of experimenting with metal the 1990s. The works currently on exhibition at Thaddaeus Ropac, Night Shades and Phantoms, are among the most haunting made in this time, perhaps because of the predominance of black, white and grey. Their bringing together of industrial materials, painting and intellectual issues that preoccupied artists at this time, also make them of their era. That said, there is nothing outdated about Night Shades and Phantoms, and neither are they any less mesmerizing than they were in the 1990s. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Marsh Haven (Phantom), 1991

Robert Rauschenberg, Office Break (Phantom), 1991

In many of the works, Rauschenberg brings together two or three photographs screen printed onto the metal supports, creating surfaces filled with a multiplication of bifurcations and trifurcations. Beyond the surface, there is tension between the metal and the image printed and/or painted on its surface, often of nature or cloth blowing int he wind. The transience of the fabric, animals and plants is always in tension with the apparent industrial intransigence of metal. In the images of the Phantom series, doors and windows, shadows and trees float over the surface of the mirrored aluminium, appearing and disappearing, depending on where we stand. There are also tensions and conflicts between the layers they create, layers of images jostling on and as the surface. Indeed, the works are all about surface. They are about the properties and fabric of aluminium put to an unusual use, as support for images that are filled with walls, windows, curtains, doorways, and signage. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Bounders (Phantom), 1991

Rauschenberg's process creates more conflicts and clashes. Photographs printed or screened onto metal supports produce a merging of multiple mass produced images into a one of a kind. Rauschenberg took the photographs with a Polaroid camera driving across the US, and thus, ended up with single images without negatives taken in places on his trail. Reproduction of any kind was out of the question. The hand made, carefully crafted images often have a stroke of paint on their surface, a brush of tarnish on aluminium, the single artistic gesture to seal their uniqueness. The transience of the process is likewise repeated in the appearance of "phantoms"; the ink can be so faint that the images begin to look like pictures pulled away from the surface, leaving the outline of an object such as a fire hydrant or an animal wandering across an open window.

Robert Rauschenberg, Driveway Detour (Night Shade), 1991

I also kept hearing the images. The sounds of aluminium are always loud, and wandering through the exhibition, the clanking of machines, cranking of mechanisms, the movement of pistons in Nightshades in particular consume the gallery spaces. In this they reminded me of Bruce Baillie's Castro Street. The Phantom images, on the other hand, whisper. 

Robert Rauschenberg, Drums (Night Shade), 1991

Indeed, the multi-sensory evocations of Rasuchenberg's work are what ensure that they are not outdated; the images are so much more than representative of a moment in history when the industrial and the natural did battle over the same environment without consciousness. Rauschenberg's ability to make metal so eloquent and nuanced is another among the many reasons for the works' ongoing potency.