The still life is about the fragility of all things, including us. But it is also a way of thumbing a symbolic nose at mortality. The fruit stays ripe forever, the tablecloth is always pristine, the flowers remain in bloom and the picture that depicts all of the above has the potential to outlive the artist.
Photographers have followed the long lead of painters in this genre, but the ambitions have clearly been shared ones since the official birth of photography in the 1839 – and even earlier. As art historian Hanneke Grootenboer points out, Frenchman Nicéphore Niépce managed to capture an image of a table setting on a glass plate in 1826. A photograph can keep a blossom from wilting as efficiently as a painting.
Laura Letinsky isn't terribly interested in perfectly preserved fruit or a tidy table. In her large-format color photographs, on view at the Joseph Bellows Gallery, it tends to be half-eaten or rotting. The things on the table often look like the aftermath of an overly indulgent dinner party. At least at first glance they do.
Actually the 16 selections in her exhibition, titled “Hardly More Than Ever” after a recently published book (2004) on the Chicago-based artist, take such notions of dissipated material to an artful extreme. (It was published for a museum-scale show mounted that same year at the University of Chicago's Renaissance Society.) These pictures are carefully arranged and just as carefully lit.
Letinsky uses a tablecloth much like a painter might use a stretch of white, beige or brown in a canvas. Objects interrupt its uniformity the way a stroke of color would in a painting.
DATEBOOK
“Hardly More Than Ever,” color photographs by Laura Letinsky
Through March 4;
Joseph Bellows Gallery, 7661 Girard Ave., La Jolla
Free; (858) 456-5620 or josephbellows.com
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The view in “Untitled #33” (2001) is from above. The table stretches from the bottom of the picture nearly to the top. There are crumbled napkins on it, creating textured white on white toward the bottom, and one bright red cherry, a mostly eaten pear and a small pile of pits toward the top. These and other elements are asymmetrical, as in most of her photographs, but Letinsky seems able to give most of her compositions an idiosyncratic sense of order.
Look at how she uses circles in “Untitled #55” (2002), in which a white plate sits atop a circular table covered with a white tablecloth. Red juice or wine stains form fragmentary circles too. She plays all of these rounded edges off of the rectangular edges of the picture itself.
One way she sustains our interest is through the striking differences between her still lifes. In “Untitled #63 (2002), Letinsky gathers bowls, an ornamented glass and a slice of an apple in the right corner of a table covered by a heavily wrinkled cloth. Its surface resembles a textured landscape. In “Untitled #92” (2004), the cloth is pressed and the flowers an intense magenta; the well-ordered arrangement on the table is different than that in the mirror on the wall behind it.
No matter what the differences between 17th-century Dutch still-life painters and Letinsky, their art shares bedrock interests. As Suzanne Ghez, director of the Renaissance Society, writes, “Both Letinsky and the Dutch masters share an interest in looking as it becomes seeing and seeing as it becomes contemplation.”
Letinsky's arrangements do just that, by taking the ordinary and sharpening the viewer's awareness of it. This is what the still life, when it succeeds, has been doing since ancient times.
She also overcomes an obstacle that a 17th-century artist never encountered. Commercial photography, particularly in food magazines and food sections of newspapers, has usurped the conventional still life to a great degree. Doing something unconventional with the genre is the obvious challenge and Letinsky has managed to create something new, something her own, with a genre that can often look tired.
Robert L. Pincus: (619) 293-1831;
robert.pincus@uniontrib.com
