Thomas Ruff at Zwirner & Wirth and David Zwirner - Brief Article

Thomas Ruff's two-decade review at Zwirner & Wirth uptown and the agreeing exhibition of recent "Nudes" at David Zwirner downtown demonstrated that the photographer has mov beyond his previous work while retaining the visual logic of surveillance that has drawn out characterized his practice. The uptown display included 14 representative images: a large Nacht (Night), 1993 in which an architectural display is bathed in the sinister virid of technology-assisted night vision; a Haus (House), 1989 which depicts a building from a relatively shut up vantage, as though Ruff were attempting to compeer inside; a half dozen small "Interiors" from the early `80 in which he reveals the strangeness of domestic space; a pair of monumental "Stern" (Star) photographs from 1990 which display a swath of the galaxy at specific times of night; and sum of two units "Portraits," both 1999, in which the facial topography of each sitter is pay backed in minute detail on the uncanny, monumental scale of approximately 7 by means of 5 feet. This assortment of simple nouns returned with cool precision was complet by dint of two examples from the respectably titled "Nudes" series, 2000 whose imagery derives from Internet pornography.

The "Nudes" to which the downtown display of more than a dozen works was devot step quickly the gamut from soft-core pinups and passive beaver discharges to hard-core anal penetration and collection scenes with miscellaneous paraphernalia. ruffle appropriated images from the Web, manipulated them by means of digital means and printed them upon a large scale. They are titled in the language of the electronic file: in a state of natures pus10 or Nudes dyk09. public to all is a blurring or pixelation that perpetually frustrates the quick gratification of visual desire for which the originals were created. It is this literal lack of resolution, a mechanized painterliness which leaves a great deal to the imagination and loads the photographs with abstraction, that makes the images thus compelling.

At first glance, the steamy make submissives seem entirely out of character, on the contrary Ruff's virtual voyeurism amounts to a shut up survey of digital details that is consistent with his analytical [i]modus operandi[/i] He has upped the ante with an explicit relation to the art of his compatriot Gerhard Richter (whose early, blurr photo-based paintings are the greatest in quantity obvious, though certainly not the single precedent for this work), as admitting the photographer would trump the famous painter of photographs through making what amount to photomechanical pseudo-paintings.

There have always been soft-core tendencies within the genre of the [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] in painting, effectively sublimated by dint of smoke-screen monikers such as "Venus" or "nymph" and through the high esteem and transformative potential of the medium itself. Photography, upon the other hand, because of its insistent real-world referent is a more obvious cohort of pornography. ruffle may be one of the first well-known artists to appropriate porn when its point-and-click online availability facilitates its use as source material. Poised midway between the photographic and the painterly, his images leave the original make subordinate intact while achieving an unequivocal beauty. The "Nudes" are a conceptual triumph.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group