TROY BRAUNTUCH
3 June - 2 September 2007
from Tuesday to Sunday, 2 -7 pm


Born in 1954 in Jersey (New Jersey, USA), Troy Brauntuch is seen, alongside artists like Richard Baim, Christopher Williams, Jenny Holzer, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince as a member of the “Picture Generation” or “Reagan Generation,” as showcased by the exhibition A Forest of Signs / Art in the Crisis of Representation at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in 1989. This was a generation of artists that worked with the mass-produced images of Western societies, revealing their mechanisms of production and distribution and teasing out their hidden meanings. Cindy Sherman was the sole protagonist of her own photos, in which she restaged clichéd images of women from American movies. Richard Prince recycle cowboy images from advertising, rephotographing them in order to bring out the pioneer myth, etc.

Since the late 1970s Troy Brauntuch has worked with images sourced from both the domestic and public spheres. For example, there are newspaper images showing a clothes store covered in dust after the Wall Street Trade Center attack, or photos of his pet cat, which are transformed into photographs, drawings (conté pencil on cotton) or paintings. He keeps only minimal information, reconstructing the objects and subjects in a fragmentary way as if he were remembering them.
Colour is generally reduced to tone-on-tone. The space of the represented subject is rendered in a range of values, from light to dark. The background becomes a depthless swathe of monochrome colour. Against it float objects whose lack of detail makes them indecipherable. It is a way of revealing the image rather than simply making it visible; a way of getting the beholder to enter into it while obliging them to observe the material and formal qualities of the object he has created. Unlike the images that we consume day in day out, and hardly even look at, Brauntuch’s works force us to stop, to take the time to examine their surface. This dwelling on the image allows for the contemplation of subjects whose apparent banality questions the relation between their making, the meaning of the image and its symbolic scope; between what we see, what we perceive, what we understand and what it is that affects us.
But while the subjects are not clearly identifiable, these images of images nonetheless remain readable.
Brauntuch plays on this ambiguity, and on the distinctive tension between the action of looking and that of grasping meaning.

For Troy Brauntuch’s first solo show in France, Le Magasin is presenting a selection of pieces in different media and from different periods, from the late 1970s to the present, in order to convey an idea of the work’s development and coherence.