Renato D’Agostin : Tokyo Untitled (Photography Series)

Renato’s photographs are deeply rooted in the classic elements that make up his medium. Light and shadow are fused by extreme angles and the compression of space and timelessness. His images are painterly abstracts, sketches of a place that are sometimes unrecognizable, recontexturealized as shape, form and an interaction, a push and pull between negative and positive spaces. [R.S.Gallery]

Renato D’Agostin
Tokyo Untitled No. 38
Silver Gelatin Print
2008

Renato D’Agostin
Tokyo Untitled No. 2
Silver Gelatin Print
2008

Renato D’Agostin
Tokyo Untitled No. 36
Silver Gelatin Print
2008

Renato D’Agostin
Tokyo Untitled No. 16
Silver Gelatin Print
2008

Renato D’Agostin
Tokyo Untitled No. 9
Silver Gelatin Print
2008

Renato D’Agostin
Tokyo Untitled No. 8
Silver Gelatin Print
2008

“In 2007, I turned my attention to Japanese photography, which inspired me to explore what my point of view could be in a city so far from the world that had always surrounded me, but so close to the photographic imagery towards which I was addressing my attention. Longing to break the unconscious, immediate and easy processes of the known and the predictable, I traveled to Tokyo for the first time. I was immediately struck by a sense of disorientation and an inability to quickly locate my own position within the geography of the city.

My lack of precise references to the external world created in me feelings of isolation and detachment from my previously known realities. I was bewitched by the essential and monochromatic geometric forms, so delicate and precise, of the experience of street life, where these forms cause sounds to fall into a deep silence, muffling the interaction between architecture and human figures. I was impelled toward a quest for the unseen, for details and hidden elements. My perception of this outside world lost all sense of time, revealing an essence described by a language of the surreal and the abstract.

I later returned to Tokyo to repeat the experience. Guided by the same quest, but with a greater awareness of the cultural separation, I let isolation become introspection. I sought to recreate this world that belonged to me, as it is reflected by the city’s reality, while appropriating images and moments that delineate the “me” within its boundaries. It’s become my Tokyo. These works represents a visual record of my journey and its invisible elements diluted in visible everyday life.”

[Extract : Renato D'Agostin : Tokyo Untitled]

Tokyo Unlimited : Video

Renato D’Agostin : Website

Renato D’Agostin : Randall Scott Gallery

David DiMichele : Pseudo Documentation

Pseudo Documentation, is a series of large-scale photographs depicting grandiose installations in fantasy exhibition spaces. DiMichele creates this work by first building scale models of exhibition spaces, and producing original artworks in drawing, painting and sculpture mediums, which are sited in the spaces and then photographed to create the final works. The Pseudo Documentation photographs are inspired by DiMichele’s background with photography, installation art, abstract forms and passion for monumental museum and gallery architecture combined to create this photographic series of work.

Pseudodocumentation : Salt & Asphalt
Lightjet print
40 x 80 inches
2007

Pseudodocumentation: Branches
Lightjet print
42 x 60 inches
2006

Pseudodocumentation: Broken Glass
Lightjet print
40 x 60 inches
2006

Pseudodocumentation: Desert Disks
Lightjet print
42 x 68 inches
2007

Pseudodocumentation: Hose Drawing
Lightjet print
42 x 55 inches
2007

Pseudodocumentation: Bark Painting
Chromogenic digital print
Edition of 6
42 x 55 inches

Earlier in his career, DiMichele was known for his abstract painting and installation work, which often questioned conventions and traditions of non-objective art. For the Pseudo Documentation series, DiMichele unveils a new body of work that continues these investigations through imagination and manipulation seen in these large-scale photographs. DiMichele’s process is to create three-dimensional models of exhibition spaces and create within that space various art work that are contingent on the illusion of the architecture and space of the model he creates.

The resulting installation model of the exhibition space is photographed and the result creates a complete environment in the scale model gallery. DiMIchele’s idea for this series evolved out of documenting installation projects that he had created, as well as thinking about the nature of art documentary photography in itself. The fact that DiMichele creates artwork that is of a highly representational nature, by utilizing figuration, perspective, lighting etc. is mainly to create works that deal with issues in abstract art.

The models in Pseudo Documentation, playfully allude to the extreme size of contemporary art exhibition spaces such as the Tate Modern, his photographs infer a grandiose scale that matches or exceeds such spaces. Although the photographs are clearly representational in every way, the imagery and subject matter reflect the artist’s interest in the forms and history of modernist abstraction. [K.G.]

David DiMichele : Website

David DiMichele : Kopeikin Gallery

Eluvium : “The Motion Makes Me Last” Video

Track : “The Motion Makes Me Last” : From the album “Similes”
Label : Temporary Residence : Directed by Matt McCormick

Friederike von Rauch : Photography

Friederike von Rauch
Gent #20
Pigment print
2009

Friederike von Rauch
Berlin #5
C-print mounted on aluminium
2002

Friederike von Rauch
Brussels #2
C-print mounted on aluminium
2006

Friederike von Rauch
Brussels #6
C-print mounted on aluminium
2006

Friederike von Rauch
Dienerkammer #3
Pigment print
2008

Friederike von Rauch photographs buildings. A complete building or merely a detail. The building on its own, or within its surroundings. The interior or the exterior. Her photographs are meticulously stylized. The framing and the angle are chosen with care. She describes herself as an intuitive photographer. Her work is not so much about buildings. It’s about spaces. She looks for spots that to her are exceptional, but that most people walk by without even a glance.

In her photographs the silence is the first thing that strikes you. The silence, however, does not equal quiet. There is a tension to the silence. This tension grows from the absence of people; despite the unbreakable link between buildings and human beings. Buildings are made by people and are used by them. The lack of a human presence deprives the buildings of their functionality. The buildings in her photographs are no longer buildings, but monumental sculptures. [Extract : Gallery 51]

Friederike von Rauch : Website

Kunstagenten Gallery

Fifty One

Edgar Martins : “When Light Casts no Shadow” Series.

“In reflecting on the complexity of the negotiations between estranged lives and de-territorialised worlds, one might wonder if the generic city is synonymous with the contemporary airport. Immured in temporality and suffering from a sense of historical discontinuity, the airport is the elementary expression of abstract space. It renders everyone weightless. It is the space of the uprooted and, as if to confirm the term terrain vague, in my images sky and ground collide, overlap and blur. The cloudy ambiguity of these images pulls us into a deep absence, a sliding, fleeting and powerful somewhere, where everything is indeterminate and difficult to decode, with only the lights and airport hieroglyphics to orientate us.  The juxtaposition of sign and shape echoes the overlapping of time and space, disturbing language and meaning itself.” Edgar Martins

C-type Prints : “When Light Casts no Shadow” Series : 2008

Edgar Martins was granted airside access to some of the most interesting airports in Europe. The ones he chose have had a key role in history or the history of aviation (for example the Azores, was a compulsory stop for transatlantic flights prior to 1970 and a military base in both World Wars).

Almost all his images were produced at night, using the aprons’ floodlights, moonlight, long or double exposures of between ten minutes to two hours. Some of the airports on the Azores archipelago are unique. They are amongst the very few black-tarred runways in the world, and it is the relationship between the dark tarmac and the fluorescent painted signs and runway markings that lie at the heart of some of Martins’ most arresting images.

This unusual combination allowed him to produce incredibly abstract images, with a very long depth of field and often with the use of minimal lighting. In some, sky and ground merge in darkness with only the lights and airport hieroglyphics to orient us. Yet even these are hard to decode, for whilst this is a landscape of signs that can be read by the knowledgeable – pilots and air traffic controllers, for example – it remains perplexing to the uninitiated.

There are also areas in which this complex visual language is further ruptured, as new and old markings merge, echoing the overlapping of time, space and different eras, and disturbing language and meaning itself. These juxtapositions of sign and shape and their ambiguity of meaning are central to these remarkable images. is at the heart of these remarkable images. [Extract : IPA Gallery]

Edgar Martins : Website

Edgar Martins : Saatchi Gallery

Edgar Martins Series : Minimal Exposition

The Accidental Theorist Series : Kopeikin Gallery

François Vautier : Blade Runner Revisited

An experimental film in tribute to Ridley Scott’s legendary film “Blade Runner” (1982)

François Vautier : Vimeo