The original plaster forms, like the paintings on foil, are never shown. (The leitmotif of the camera – a box with an aperture accepting a flood of light – is present here, as is that of printing, especially if one accepts as part of that process the stringent editing and finishing to which Pearson subjects all his work.) As with the solarizations, these sculptures corral a mixture of fluid gestures into still, dry media and a closely cropped format. These two categories of prints – one a silver gelatin photograph, one a digital c-type print – were subsequently triangulated with a third element: plinth-mounted sculptures made from polished bronze, cast from plaster poured into a box-like mould. Untitled (Plaster Positive) (detail), 2012, Hydrocal and walnut frame, 152 × 111 × 9 cm Like much of Pearson’s work, they are talking about something that is very, very far away. They have been described by some commentators as reminiscent of the sun when obscured by ‘June Gloom’ – hazy white discs burning through fields of flat black or grey.3 This is also what relates them to the solarizations: both strands of his practice acknowledge the fundamental role of the sun in the photographic process. Contradictory because, while the latter are small, intense and gestural, the ‘flares’ are large, minimalist and somewhat vapid. The resulting ‘flares’ (again, Pearson’s terminology for the untitled works) are both contradictory and sympathetic to the solarized prints. Dwelling on his original intent to make abstract photographs, he retrieved the negatives exposed in the sun-damaged camera, and used them to make digital scans. Pearson refers to the untitled prints as ‘solarizations’.2 They comprise the first strand of what he now considers his mature work, though they were not alone for long. In others, texture evaporates into a dreamy softness that recalls the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray. Sometimes, an impression in the photograph of the crinkled metal survives, or a dark dribble attests to the fluidity of paint. These photographs are distant and detached artefacts: each seems to possess a dim memory of wild energy and fast movement but their deadened, silver gelatin surfaces make it hard to parse their original materiality. Each print is untitled and unique, and the original foil paintings are destroyed. Sometimes he solarizes the prints in the darkroom, an unpredictable process that involves flashing the unfixed image with light in order to tonally reverse areas of white and black. Pearson’s prints are always the same size – six by four-and-a-half inches, mounted with wide borders in wooden frames – and, aside from a few early experiments, are all black and white photographs of gestural paintings he has made, usually on pieces of aluminium foil. One long exposure was so intense that it burnt a hole in the interior of his camera. He rented a 500 mm telephoto lens in order to take photographs of the sun. He was always disappointed with the pictures that he took. He would wander, alone, in landscapes that seemed to him freighted with atmospheric significance. He was looking for ways to make a photograph that asserted itself as a singular object, that was no longer washed in the same churning ocean as every other photograph ever taken. At first he took pictures of people, then places with people in them, then landscapes without people, then landscapes depicted almost entirely in silhouette, then the sky only. Pearson trained as a photographer in the 1990s. Taken in its entirety – not just photographic prints but gloopy bronze obelisks, dark tablets cast from clay and more – it comes into focus as a taut matrix, extending in unexpected ways from the ‘four-sided arena’ of Pearson’s personal and professional rôle as an artist living in Los Angeles. His work is rapt in conversation with the art of the past. He has, however, made a number of art works that resemble miniaturized black and white photographic reproductions of archetypal Abstract Expressionist canvases – hints of Franz Kline here, Helen Frankenthaler or Robert Motherwell there. The interest lies in the kind of act taking place in the four-sided arena, a dramatic interest.’1Īnthony Pearson is not an action painter. The painting itself is a “moment” in the adulterated mixture of his life.’ He continues: ‘With traditional aesthetic references discarded as irrelevant, what gives the canvas its meaning is not the psychological data but rôle, the way the artist organizes his emotional and intellectual energy as if he were a living situation. ‘A painting that is an act,’ wrote Harold Rosenberg in his trenchant 1952 essay ‘American Action Painters’, ‘is inseparable from the biography of the artist. Untitled (Tablet), 2012, bronze relief with silver nitrate patina, 200 × 8.3 × 1.9 cm
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