Known for his wide shots of cities, Sze Tsung Leong, a British-American artist born in Mexico, now returns to the Yossi Milo with Horizons, a series first exhibited at the gallery in 2008 and presented now with additional photographs. As in his other projects, they take us around the world, exploring the diversity of its landscapes and drawing a contemporary portrait of its modern and ancient cities.
The photographs should be be seen up close to appreciate the details, which are invisible one instant, remarkable the next. We find ourselves in Mexico, Tel Aviv, in the plains of Kenya, on Iceland’s cold and stormy seas, on the sandy bay of Mont Saint Michel and the banks of Lake Michigan. There’s no redundancy in the pictures. Each represents a unique environment from an astonishing perspective.
Sometimes it’s cold, sometimes warm. It’s often white, the white of overcast skies, the white of water that’s forgotten to be blue, the white of nothingness covering the entire photographs, barely disturbed by the horizon, which bisects the image. In the middle, near the horizon, a few waves, people, pieces of land. There, in full anonymity, are man’s constructions, and whether they rise up several floors or remain at ground level, they bow to the elements, the horizon nothing more than a line that allows them to survive, the abyss determined to exist. When they aren’t flesh-colored, azure or mother-of-pearl, they are green, red and brown. Pasture green, with nuclear power plants looming behind grazing cattle, cherry red like the roofs of Venice, clay brown like the California deserts. Some photographs communicate with each other, discussing the architecture of cities like Paris and Havana. Above their heads remains the dome of milky clouds, that great veil of which we’re never sure if it means to protect us, or bury us.
EXPOSITION
Sze Tsung Leong, Horizons
Until June 28th, 2014
Galerie Yossi Milo
245 10th Avenue
New York, NY 10001
USA
(212) 414-0370
