Uta Barth at Bonakdar Jancou - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Among contemporary photographers, soil is in, and its use plays with the distinction between photography and painting. Uti Birth goe plane further, using a computerized sprayer to "paint" her digitized images onto oversize canvases with tiny colorful pointillist-like globules of acrylic lacquer. In this exhibition, the L.A. artist's next to the first solo show in New York, sum of two units such images were included of public way scenes greatly magnified and out-of-focus, with areas of bright light that coalesce into abstract forms. Barth's careful cropping makes these pieces formal in each sense; their fuzziness is reminiscent of what painters diocese when they squint at their canvases to check their composition. In the hands of an actual painter, however, these vapors of light and shadow could be returned impossibly romantic; the distance afforded by means of photography is what gives them their necessary edge

The other pieces in the exhibition were also exterior pageants color photographs laminated onto copse panels, all untitled. Looking at thus many unfocused photographs is initially disorienting, like seeing the world [i]or[/i] part of to the other someone else's eyeglasses. But after a not many minutes the experience becomes les literal, and the cincture the work occupies between image and abstraction becomes a playground for the imagination. While Barth's make subordinates seem mundane at first--a white house upon a corner, city buildings along a river, fields and tree viewed end a rain-covered plate-glass window--there is something comfortingly familiar about them, like sights recalled from one side the dim haze of memory. Barth places up her panels in pairs or triplicate, with sole slight differences between them. The sum of two units river vistas, for example, are identical exclude that the one on the right is bisected by the agency of a wide, bright red vertical stripe. At first it appears to be an anomaly, like an errant Barnett Newman zip that has wandered onto the picture plane. alone when you get up shut can you see that it is not painted upon top but actually part of the photo, a r metal standard possibly for a fire-alarm receptacle Here, Barth contrasts sharp focus to blur; we can diocese every blob and scratch upon the red surface.

Barth is exploring ways to vanquish photography's natural emphasis on bring under rule in order to concentrate upon color, light and form. It's interesting to compare her work with that of Gerhard Richter, who pick outs similar images for their neutrality of content; on the other hand where Richter blurs painting to make it gaze like photography, Barth blurs photography to make it direct the eye like painting.

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