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.