The Marian Goodman Gallery in Paris presents the first Parisian exhibition of the conceptual photographer James Welling.
While James Welling has from the very start experimented with all sorts of techniques (Polaroids, gelatin silver prints, inkjet prints, photograms, chemigrams, etc.) and abstract compositions, over the past twelve years he has been studying color with the same appetite for experimentation. The exhibition highlights this brilliantly—starting with the series New Flowers, photogram montages made using multiple negatives, whose cheerful, hallucinatory vision is an entry point into Welling’s complex relationship with chromatic diversity. “As I became sensitized to unnatural colors, I realized that they were not unnatural – I just hadn’t noticed them. Becoming attuned to color has led me to think that we actually see more color than we normally perceive. I guess in some way I’m trying to liberate color,” he explained. The buoyant harmonies of color found in Dégradés bring to mind Rothko’s paintings.
It is the basement portion of the exhibition, however, that is absolutely dazzling. The psychedelic compositions in Choreograph center around dance, architecture, and landscape. Each image is constructed on the basis of three superimposed black-and-white photographs subsequently colored in red, green, and blue (RGB). It’s hard to say what lends more energy to these images: the elegant, melodious movement of the bodies, the enigmatic structure of the composition, or the surprising chromatic effect which is as well-crafted as it is unexpected. In Meridian, Welling photographed a Rhode Island printing house and then digitally manipulated the colors. The captivating result is a blend of muted and lively hues which call attention to the machinery, printing techniques, and thus to their relationship with photography. Lastly, the artist’s latest video is projected in the screening room. Seascape is a montage of 16-mm film sequences shot by Welling’s grandfather evoking the seaside, the nostalgia for familial memories, a moment out of time… Some of the pieces help bridge life and art, since James Welling’s father worked in a printing house while the artist himself practiced dance, painting, sculpture, video, and performance before becoming a self-taught photographer. Welling studied, among others, at the California arts Institute in Los Angeles (CalArts) under John Baldessari, with whom he later worked as an assistant in 1973–74 and who had an enormous influence on his practice.
The Marian Goodman Gallery has also just opened a cutting-edge bookshop across the street from the gallery in rue du Temple. The adjoining exhibition space features a few of James Welling’s early works: fascinating Polaroids from the 1970s, whose colors have been altered through the application of heat or refrigeration; lavender-tinted Glass House; precious Los Angeles Architecture and Portraits which are like time capsules preserving the memories of the artist’s California friends Matt Mullican, David Salle, Ericka Beckman, and Laura Hawkins. There are also Hands (1975/2016), beautiful negative prints of photograms of the artist’s hands, inspired by the work of Moholy-Nagy. “I divide photography into lens-based pictures and photograms. The lens-based model is based on the Renaissance idea of picture, whereas the photogram is a shadow of an object on a photographic surface. Neither is entirely abstract because both connect to a referent,” noted Welling. The origin of his most recent pieces has come a full circle: “I loved the notion of ventriloquism. The idea that the vocabulary of photography could exist independent of the subject, that I could throw my voice into a photograph, or that the photograph was creating its own voice, all that was very important,” he explained in conversation with the American art critic Hal Foster.
In parallel to the exhibition at the Marian Goodman Gallery, the Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent is hosting a vast retrospective of the artist’s work (James Welling Metamorphosis, on view until April 16).
Anne-Claire Meffre
Anne-Claire Meffre is a journalist specializing in photography. She lives and works in Paris, France.
James Welling, Chronology
January 25 to March 2, 2017
Marian Goodman Gallery
79 rue du Temple
75003 Paris
France
