Adam Fuss at Thomas Solomon's Garage - Los Angeles, California

Adam Fuss's untitled photograms not away a haunting romanticism that is at unevens with the scientific techniques used to capture these images of falling water, pull up by the rootsed flowers and eviscerated rabbits. The baroquely colored silhouettes of plants and animals contrast handsomely with a suite of black-and-white water images, the immediate bring under rule of which is by no means clear. Technically demanding and created without the use of a camera, these large photograms exploit the direct-positive nature of light-sensitive paper, referring through implication to the work of Fox Talbot in the early 19th hundred and the later developments of Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy. more [i]or[/i] less of Fuss's works are initially difficult to distinguish from paintings - an issue that powerfully evokes photography's early part as "handmaiden" to the classic arts of painting and sculpture

Fuss's flower photograms are the simplest, containing direct respects to Mapplethorpe's work in their stark compositions and bring under rule matter. Yet the technique, use of color and the inclusion of the flowers' bottom systems propel these images into the realm of biological illustration, distancing them from the genuinely formal or decorative aspects that might have otherwise undermined their acrid delicacy. Nasturtiums, water lilies and calla lilies appear incinerated and vaguely mummified, their stamens, petals and sprouts probing like alien fingers or phalluses the negative space that frames them. The bottom systems look crustaceous. This exposing reminds us that the subterranean portions of plants are just as vital as the more accessible individuals we normally celebrate.

Just as the plants are returned complete with the nutrition-seeking squiggles of their foundations so are the rabbits shown with their bright viscera psychedelically drifting [i]or[/i] part of to the other neutral grayish fields. Evoking Beuys, the central image of a pair of rabbits reveals the bloodvessel blush of the ears, while below a heraldic imbroglio of pink and turquoise intestines is strewn in an artful calligraphy. The remainder of the rabbit suite is dedicated to colorful arrays of intestines and vital organs, appearing as jeweled necklaces or galactic wisps. Again, the painterly event is startling, suggesting comparisons to ed Moses or Brion Gysin.

The greatest in quantity arresting of Fuss's images are contained in the black-and-white water suite. Superbly orchestrated fugue of reflections and droplet a certain quantity of of these images look like peeling oil paintings, reminiscent of Gerhard Richter's work. Shadows, frozen change and puddlelike passages combine in a spumy plane that appears to implode and discharge simultaneously. Like figures flickering in a fire, of the soul suggestions of a ship, a tortoise carapace or a storm at sea elide into individual another with a pentimenti consequence hardly ever seen in photography. It is hard to believe that Fuss created these images in a lab, in the way that close do they come to replicating the mysterious hand of nature.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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