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La poesie des affiches - Susan Aurinko - USA Show essay by Michael Weinstein, American Photography Critic If there is any need for proof that the same photographic strategy can yield sharply contrasting effects, it is provided by the deeply intense layered images of distressed posters and handbills produced by Susan Aurinko and Claude Andreini. Both artists are masters in their creative prime, blending postmodern sophistication with modernist precision. Most importantly, they are committed to making method serve meaning and to endowing significance with emotional resonance. Yet their sensibilities could not be more opposite. Roaming the city streets of Europe and the United States, Aurinko shoots black-and-white studies of walls papered with layers of torn and shredded posters that come to life vibrantly as their varied texts and graphics combine, under careful framing, into a carnival of unplanned meaning, in which the antipodes of life and the dimensions of time are compressed into vital power. Radiating affirmation, Aurinko reveals that out of decay and destruction can arise a richer rebirth. Also a wanderer, Andreini sets out in search of images of people that have been effaced by the elements and the human hand. After he has taken his black-and-white shot, he double prints it and hand tints one of the images on a transparent overleaf, creating a work of photo-art that is suffused with a profound sense of loss. Whereas Aurinko resurrects the dead, Andreini insists that they be kept in the past, tantalizingly beyond our reach, yet still barely present as traces. Surely, in order to grasp and feel all of life, we need both sensibilities. It is even better that the two artists incorporate both sides of the equation of existence. Aurinko is no optimist; her images often contain brutality in their mix that is redeemed by energy. Andreini is no pessimist; he tempers the inaccessibility of the past with a warm glow of piercing beauty. |
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