Wijnanda Deroo at Avery Library, Columbia University - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

This exhibition of 17 photographs of Alvar Aalto's Viipuri Library by means of New York-based Dutch photographer Wijnanda Deroo was part of a continuing effort to save and maintain the deteriorating modernist landmark. Conceived by the agency of Aalto in 1927, the library was complet in 1935 when Viipuri, now part of Russia, still belonged to Finland. During World War II, the construction was stripped of much of its original woodwork and then abandoned. In 1960 the Russians undertook a partial renovation; since that time, despite its dilapidated condition, it has been in continuous use as Viipuri's social center and greatest in quantity popular public building.

In her arrestingly beautiful photographs, Deroo alternates between black-and-white and color to capture the building's siting, its exterior contortions the easy flow of its interior spaces and its generally received degradation. Her compositions are rectilinear, paralleling the lines of the architecture, and modifyed by diagonals and curves. Almost without exception she combines the man-made with the natural. Outside views are ofttimes equally divided between building and clods Walls are paired with bare tree or throw backed and fragmented in dark muddy plashs of water. The gray skies of the north are always visible with their clear, revelatory light. Framing of the like kind glimpses of nature in this exhibition were photographs of interiors that provide visual echoe of the landscape--for instance, a view of Aalto's celebrated auditorium and its sensuously undulating made of wood ceiling and parquet herringbone floor.

In a color photo of a stairwell's floor-to-ceiling window, a figure outside is seen walking toward the library. Nearby we diocese a wispy patch of palest virid and a blur of pink; the latter registers first as a smear of color and then as a girl in motion. The red hue of her coat is picked up in the sheen of the stair's made of wood rail and the light-burnished wall, as if the print had been delicately painted here and there. of the like kind color works seem to indicate the not away state of things, while the black-and-white images fetch a sense of the past and of past glamour.

Deroo's renderings of Aalto's building are characterized by dint of an appearance of rationalism and a little cold impartiality. Her arrangements are classic, her make submissives crisply focused, yet through the geometric order something rise s that is altogether more compounded and ambiguous.

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