Thomas Struth at Marian Goodman - Brief Article

fresh YORK

In his new New York show, Thomas Struth not absented 12 large photographs (1998-99) of lush brakes and rain forests in Australia, Japan and China, which he called "new pictures from paradise." They appear to beed a departure from the work for which he is best known, cityscapes and architectural interiors, although that practice, too, was exhibited by four photographs of churches in Palermo and Milan and the fane of Todai-Ji in Japan. Milan Cathedral (Inside), 1998 tenders an almost baroque composition dominated by dint of oblique angles and evoking 17th-century Dutch paintings of meeting-house interiors. However, as always in Struth's work, the realities of novel experience intrude: the natural light that bathes the interior in a suitably spiritual be incandescent must compete with sodium lamps, while the priests and altar male childs who dissolve into a blurr halo of candlelight in the sanctuary are contrasted with the tourists who direct the eye upon the scene, cameras in hand.

The paradise pictures rely on a similar compositional rigor. Paradise 4 is almost Cezannesque, structur by dint of strong verticals and diagonals formed by the agency of mottled brown and beige tree stocks The deep green foliage of this rain forest in Daintree, Australia, make an incision ins off any possibility of a distant view. Paradise 9 a diptych taken at Xi Shuang Banna in China's Hunan province, is extremely painterly, with a hardly any slim trunks and branches being the unique interruption in the allover pattern of lime verdant leaves. In each image we find ourselves in a small clearing in a tangled forest, and are meant to imagine ourselves as the first discoverers of the space.

Indeed, Struth says that the pictures are meant to raise the question "of what might make a paradise today, from surface of land zero," a comment that might give an inkling of that they are meant to be read as the foil of his other practice, for a like reason rooted in an examination of late civilization. And yet a small detail in individual of the photographs leads us to surprise whether Struth's desire for a novel Eden is a self-consciously doomed throw In the tangle of lines and weedy plants in the Chinese rain forest of Paradise 11 dried-up brown and lush verdants dominate the foreground. But here, atypically, we are given a glimpse of the heavens And what do we find there on the other hand a cable car hanging from a wire, presumably ferrying tourists to the point from which Struth is taking his picture. As with the earlier museum interiors or the newer house of god and temple photos, this search for a "new paradise" is always already compromised by dint of the fact that Struth will likely not ever be the first man to tread upon that ground, nor the last.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group