CARLA KLEIN: UNTITLED 2005 - 2008

...understanding …starts from not accepting the world as it looks.
Susan Sontag

Our culture’s belief in the documentary veracity of the photograph ended long ago. Today, our love affair with photography wholly embraces its enormous capacity for interpretation and manipulation by means of now well-known and theorized medium-specific techniques. Painting offers an illusionistic space, or conversely, a surface upon which to abstractly express oneself, examine the limitations of the picture plane, or create a phenomenological site of contemplation rather than representation. But what if a painting could serve as an interpretation of a photographic image while simultaneously calling attention to what might constitute the primary aspects of the medium’s ontology—its technological and manual processes? In other words, a painting that sought not to realistically portray or simulate (as in the sharp photorealism of Richard Estes or even the blurry and muted translation of photo to canvas put forward by Gerhard Richter), but rather to translate and embellish what is captured by the lens while remaining faithful to the photograph’s specific physical qualities: the framing and cropping of the image, the surface’s propensity for scratches, or the impact of the printing process on color?

For the past several years, Dutch painter Carla Klein has focused her camera, and then her paintbrush, on wide expanses of landscape while driving through hushed terrains more remarkable for their lack of the type of awe-inspiring physical monuments that tourists in cars clamor to see than for their quiet emptiness. In recent years, Klein has traveled through the Great Salt Lake Desert in Utah and parts of Texas taking photographs out her car window along the way, and while the paintings on view come out of those road trips, the specificity of site hardly matters. Indeed, in the three paintings featured here, Robert Smithson’s term “non-site” immediately comes to mind, for these landscapes, invaded with such markers of human intervention as an asphalt highway jutting forward toward the horizon line and the white stripes of a parking lot, appear to be in the middle of nowhere. And yet, despite their adherence to the general over the naming of place (all of Klein’s canvases remain untitled), these are resolutely familiar scenes.

Susan Sontag remarked that our propensity to chronicle our lives through photography is related to our desire to “capture” our experiences. The evidentiary results not only prove that we were somewhere or participated in one social rite or another, but somehow make the original place or event more real. Of course, as she points out, snapshots of one’s life are simply fragments, only instantaneous moments, and, “…the camera’s rendering of reality must always hide more than it discloses.” 1 The photograph’s limited ability to impart knowledge—its “muteness,” as Sontag calls it—is something Klein is particularly attuned to. By translating her photographs into large-scale paintings, Klein seems, in part, to be arguing for the photograph’s failure to signify anything. In her work, the function of the photograph as a sign is negated and the impulse to capture is replaced by a prolonged and meticulous rendering. We are now allowed to peruse and muse over these images rather than glance over them quickly and voraciously (as most photographs are consumed in our culture). Klein’s re-animation of her images necessarily breaths life back into them and slows down our reading.

Time is reversed, or seems to stand still, and just as we don’t know where we are when we stand next to these desolate landscapes, we also don’t know what time it is: past, present, or future. Although this type of dislocation and disorientation can be disconcerting, in Klein’s careful hands, it is, conversely, liberating, as if we are freed from the stubbornness of the photograph.

Choosing to limit her palette to primarily smoky grays, ethereal blues, and white, Klein’s paintings create a sensibility, a mood, more than they seek to represent a time or place. And while the role of the open road and untouched land has a long history inextricably bound to fundamental ideas about identity, Klein’s images are ultimately so personal that they avoid explicit social and political ideologies. The primary formal structure of these works is the horizon line and its division of sky from ground, and we recognize the images as landscapes. Yet, the barrenness of these spaces also allows Klein to straddle the division between representation and abstraction. Her ability to distill an image—to bring clarity and focus to so vast a space—increases our sensitivity to the formal questions of color, composition, and paint application that inform our reading of a painting.

Klein is seduced by the possibility for paintings to provoke emotions and yet her commitment to the details of the photographic process compels her work away from an abstract painterly language and toward a careful consideration of photography itself. Many of Klein’s canvases have a white band across the top or bottom edge, indicating the border of the original photograph as it was printed. And if you look closely at the surfaces, the incidental traces (or we might say accidental errors) of the photographic process— fingerprints, hairs, scratches, splashes or drips—are painted onto the canvas. These marks are compelling because they help us resist the definition of the photograph as inherently unoriginal and linked solely to a representation of something that has already been. More than the mere fact of representation, these visible human mishaps may help us understand something fundamental and profound about the ways we seek to understand our surroundings. Each endlessly reproducible and distributable photographic image, it seems, carries the traces of those who have gazed upon it.

When Roland Barthes embarked on his journey to discover the essence of photography in what would become his final book, Camera Lucida, he landed upon the notion that each photograph contains a particular detail that stands out and provokes desire in the viewer. This “punctum,” as he so wonderfully called it, inspires an active reading by piercing or pricking (to borrow Barthes’ fleshy word choices) the viewer and stimulates interest or sympathy, like being awakened to the image. What we learn as Barthes carefully evaluates several photojournalistic or fine art photographs (while, in fact, searching for a snapshot of his mother that will capture her person fully) is that the punctum is, ultimately, highly personal.

Indeed, your punctum may not be my punctum, and Barthes is so aware of this that once he finds this quintessential picture of his mother, he neglects to allow his reader to even see the image. It would mean nothing to us. The punctum that so defines the image for Barthes would likely go unnoticed by any other viewer. But, perhaps Barthes was searching for this prick, this detail to awaken us, in the wrong place. If insight into the specific nature of photography is what he is after, perhaps the punctum resides in the inevitabilities of the photographic process. Although Klein translates the photograph to the canvas, the scratches and drips on the surfaces of her paintings are the punctum—they punctuate the images and stir in the viewer a desire to quietly consider not only the landscapes and open spaces before them but how our understanding of the world around us is informed in equal measure by that which is presented and that which is absent, either intentionally or by chance. Klein’s ongoing conversation and convergence between photography and painting allows her to not accept the world as it looks through the camera’s lens, as Sontag warned, but to truly look at the world.

CARLA KLEIN was born in 1970 in Zwolle, Netherlands, and now lives and works in Rotterdam. She has had recent solo exhibitions at the Berkeley Art Museum in California, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in New York and Annet Gelink Gallery in Amsterdam among others.

ANNE ELLEGOOD is curator of contemporary art at the Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden in Washington DC where her recent projects include The Uncertainty of Objects and Ideas: Recent Sculpture; The Cinema Effect: Reality, Illusion, and the Moving Image—Realisms, and Amy Sillman—First Person Singular. On November 5th, she opened Terence Gower—Public Spirit. Ellegood received her Master’s of Art from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and she currently teaches at The Center for the Study of Modern Art, University of Illinois at The Phillips.

1 Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Anchor Books, 1973): 23.