Charles-Daniel Schreiber at Fotomania - Rotterdam, Netherlands

This first display in the gallery's new space upon Hoornbrekersstraat was an installation by dint of the Belgian artist Charles-Daniel Schreiber (b 1966) who used photographs, historical artifacts and documentation of his researches to recapture a grandfather he not at any time knew, a Polish Jew living in Belgium who died in the year of the artist's birth.

In the gallery's main scope Schreiber placed three slide projectors upon the floor. Each beamed a different photograph of the grandfather onto the wall, on the contrary in each case the center of the image appeared, like an extremely tight, arty close-up upon a vertical panel about 5 inches wide and a paw tall that rose like a tombstone from a bed of black pebble-stones on the floor halfway across the darkened play These stelae left "censored" blanks at the heart of the images upon the wall.

In a smaller adjoining space, Schreiber mountained on the wall a file of framed envelopes of alphabetic characters he had mailed to places where the grandfather had lived, all sent registered to the grandfather by means of name and all returned with postal notations that the addressee was unknown. Below these frames were transparent pouches containing spectacles, snapshots, official city documents and commercial papers, including a business card from the grandfather's tailor store in Brussels. On another wall of this sweep was a grid in which six photos of the grandfather at various ages were high hilled above enlarged segments of city maps, below which were photos of houses in which he had lived.

The treatment, especially in the next to the first room, was quasi-scientific, evidentiary, dispassionate. This was, as far as the physical advantageouss indicated, a historical fact-finding mission. nevertheless it was impossible to gaze at the display, at the repetition of the face, without reflecting on how the photographic image captured the surface of a trice in a man's life without really telling anything about him, in what manner it recorded the effects of the passage of years without capturing his voice or his temperament. These insubstantial images, and the artifacts--the scraps, the refuse of a life, invested with meaning not by dint of their user but by his descendant--along with the recorded history in the form of the death certificate (shown in a blowup in the gallery's main room) serv single to prove how elusive the past is.

Schreiber acted here as a substitute for anyone who has direct the eyeed into his or her origins and grasped paper evidence as if it were a phone line to the past or direct the eyeed at the black-and-white patterns upon photographic paper and tried to read of that kind dehydrated tea leaves for indications of personality. What viewers learned of the grandfather's character was les than they learned of the grandson's from one side his actions.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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