Thomas Ruff at David Zwirner

Portraiture, modernist architecture, landscape and the erotic nude--the subjects of Thomas Ruff's photographic work have varied over the years while his sensibility has not. With stark white backdrops and shadowless light, his large color photographic portraits of the 1980s transformed anonymous individuals into a series of nearly interchangeable mannequins. Recently he has moved from taking his own photographs to creating digital manipulations of images found on the Web, but his clinical approach remains intact.

This exhibition used jpegs culled from the Internet to create a lexicon of contemporary history. The images, some of which were less distinct than others to begin with, are blown up to monumental-scale C-prints (the largest measures nearly 8 1/2 by 12 feet). The enlarging process reveals a layering of pixelated grids that render the images recognizable only from a distance. Close up, they dissolve into near abstractions as the photograph is broken down into mosaiclike patterns of dark and light squares.

Critics writing about Ruff's new work have made the inevitable comparison to Impressionist painting, where distinct, individual brushstrokes add up to a coherent illusion when viewed from afar. A more relevant precedent would seem to be Chuck Close's huge portraits, created by transferring a photographic image to canvas by laying a grid over it, enlarging it to an enormous scale, and painting each tile in the grid separately. Like Close, Ruff is engaged in an exploration of how mechanically produced images establish and undermine visual meaning.

The images Ruff has chosen range from tourist destinations like Angkor Wat and the Nile River to reproductions of landscape paintings by artists such as Caspar David Friedrich and John Constable to disaster sites, among them the eruption of Mount St. Helens, burning oil fields and the World Trade Center engulfed in smoke on 9/11. In the three World Trade Center images in this show, the dissolution of the pixelated smoke billowing around the dark geometry of the Manhattan skyline seems to presage the dissolution of the towers themselves. Abstracted in this way, the scene takes on an almost romantic beauty, bringing to mind Turner's paintings of the Houses of Parliament in flames.

In the end, such beauty seems incidental to Ruff's larger purpose, as do the very historical events he presents. What drives this work is the artist's own fascination with the artifice of photographic representation, with the difference between our perception of an object and the way a machine reproduces an image.

COPYRIGHT 2005 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2005 Gale Group