Painting on Photography: Photography on Painting
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That dialectic still engages artists in both media, as “Painting on Photography: Photography on Painting” at the Museum of Contemporary Photography shows. The straightest takes on the theme of this ambitious MCP-curated exhibit of 15 painters, photographers, and videographers come from two well-known painters, Gerhard Richter and Eric Fischl. Richter, whose career is defined by his many explorations of the overlap between the two arts, is represented by work from 1989: postcard-size shots of sylvan and urban scenes he painted over with delicate sprays and skeins of color. While deftly done, these miniatures are minor.
Fischl, though, poses large questions with Krefeld Project, Dining Room, Scene #1 (2003). This oil-on-linen painting is based on one of 2,000 color photos he took of actors hired to impersonate a couple in a dining room, though they’re actually in a museum. One photo is mounted next to the painting, which seems at first to be simply a larger reproduction of the shot. But though both show the couple seemingly about to have sex, there are significant differences. In the photo a middle-aged man, dress shirt open, leans amorously over a woman with her back to us, reclining on a chair; a string of pearls shows beneath her short reddish hair, and a dress strap slips off her left shoulder. In the painting, however, these markers of gender are gone, which makes the woman appear androgynous and younger, giving the encounter an extra charge. Fischl’s smudged expressionist style makes flesh less titillating than disturbing.
Taylor-Wood’s simple but striking manipulation of her medium underscores an axiom about photography and painting that’s become increasingly complicated since 1837, when daguerreotypes appeared: between Photoshop for photographers and photo-realism among painters, what’s seen isn’t necessarily what you get.
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