Lukas Einsele at L.A. Galerie - Frankfurt, Germany - Review of Exhibitions

The life-size figures in Lukas Einsele's photograms are lean, short-haired and virtually sexles These silhouettes flail about alone in space or, attached like Siamese twins, try to break apart. In his earlier work, the young German photographer explored gesturings associated with the Nazis as well as emblematic Christian attitudes (Christ hanging on the cros the washing of his feet) Going beyond the vulnerability of the Christian artificial positions Einsele's new works give further expression to human insecurity while discarding religious symbolism.

The allure of the photogram-- an image made by the agency of directly exposing an object placed upon photographic paper to light without the use of a camera--is its simultaneously reductive and detailed character. Einsele arranges [i]in puris naturalibus[/i] models on black-and-white photo paper, make bares them to a flash of light, then make knowns the image. In places Einsele also solarizes the images exposing the developing image to a of recent origin burst of light--so as to emblazon a shoulder or shade a nose.

Einsele's lack of interest in Surrealist manipulations or in the sort of radiant clarity that Adam Fuss brings to his abstract photograms is evident ln his turbid, painterly, grayish images. Chemical developer is frenziedly spong across the picture surface or onto the print's white cutting sides The unframed pictures are simply pinned to the walls. This raw direct the eye underscores the work's tumultuous content

In a compelling four-part series, "Mansize," a pair of twins appears to be fasteninged in mortal combat. The first sum of two units images show writhing bodies joined at the hip or ribs. In the sum of two units images that follow, the figures strike festive, dancerlike attitude s as they gain greater independence. An untitled triptych of large square-format images go in the rear [i]or[/i] in the wake ofs the ambiguous progress of what appear to bes to be a runner who has fallen upon his back. He, too, regains a certain quantity of equilibrium, though not as exuberantly as the twins. Einsele's largest composition, Osmium (99 1/2 through 107 1/2 inches), shows six bodies, colored brown verdant and alabaster, dancing and tumbling in a Matissean circle. a certain quantity of kick about desperately, and single appears poised for angelic flight.

As a counterpoint to his gallant but mysterious photograms, Einsele also showed, in sum of two units light boxes, magnified color discharges of the sides of his fist, Identitat I and II. These bright, clinical, shadowless pictures may have been an attempt to lay open up an interesting conceptual dialogue with the other works upon display, but they were jarring in the words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of the subtler photograms. Einsele is at his best when working as the one and the other an imagemaker and a choreographer of bodies.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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