Exhibition Review : 【Post Truth — George Byrne Asia Premiere】
Written by HU Jungyi (Art Critic)
The Australian Photographer George Byrne’s Asian debut solo show, “Post Truth” opened on March 8 at the Powen Gallery. A series of works showcasing metropolitan colours that are characteristics of the American urban lifestyle and Byrne’s own trajectory since his settling down in Los Angeles.
Landscape and Post Truth
George Byrne’s artistic training (in Sydney College of the Arts — Bachelor of Visual Arts) provided him with a perspective on “materiality” that goes beyond technical thinking.
“Materiality” refers to the physical marks and textures, a result of the artist’s creative labor. In the field of painting, the process is commonly referred to as “Painterliness”; in photography, we can perhaps refer to such effect as a man-made “Reproduction”. Through manipulating camera lens, interrupting the developmental process and photoshopping, a “Post Truth” perception with subjectivity is constructed. Process as such, necessarily involves the artist, demand the image maker to rise above objectivity and to constantly reflects on their storytelling approach.
“Reproduction”, is a method through which different elements of the surroundings are patched together. Through capturing different photographic elements such as balloons, trees, signs, shadows, lamp posts, etc., Byrne cleverly utilizes collage method to create a narrative. Yet, the results radiate familiarity, bringing a sense of approachability to their viewers.
George Byrne’s obsession with Los Angeles comes from the city’s radiant and vibrant atmosphere. Surrounded by a variety of great-in-volume-yet-stylistically-simple architecture, these buildings inspired him with their geometric blocks and minimalistic outlines. The vibrant colors, blended with the radiant sunlight, metamorphosized into a dreamy pastel-like atmosphere, bringing him an incessant flow of new aesthetic experiences.
The photography of spatial sites and the landscape of an empty city was influenced by the group of “New Topographics”: The photography artist, Stephen Shore, captures ordinary scenes in the city, his photographs of roads convey the sense of travel, their colors exudes warmth and neatness; Australian painter Jeffrey Smart, interested in landscape painting, has a humorous approach to documenting reality; Richard Diebenkorn’s bold and geometric color blocks combine different realistic sceneries to form a reconfigured collage of impressionistic landscape. All the aforementioned artists continue to inform and inspire George Byrne’s unique set of composition lexicon.
David Hockney once mentioned “Two dimensions don’t really exist in nature… So the flatness of a picture is a bit of an abstraction. However, it is an abstraction that has consequences. Everything on a flat surface is stylized, including the photograph” (1)
Using George Byrne’s own words, he likes “space where objects breathe”. The transformation from the spatial landscape into flat surfaces is primarily achieved through tracing the outline of the object, each outline intersecting, and then contrasting what’s real from what’s not. The flatness and the stylized presentation used in Byrne’s architectural images unveils a sort of aesthetic ideal and order: a flat wall touching parts of another building, a section of the street that is neither the starting point nor the ending point, a geometric shape of the pedestrian crossing, half of a rain sheds pairing with the rectangle roof, etc.
These are the so called “combined corners” captured by his camera. Then inserted with new elements through the act of collaging, these images causes the curious viewers to think about the missing parts that are yet to be revealed or developed. This idea is also demonstrated in his several works containing textual elements (billboard, signboard). In Do Not Enter, a “No Entry” sign seems to be attached to the top floor of the parking lot. In East Hollywood Carpark, a sign “This Parking Space has been Reserved” was put in the parking lot. These partially framed or reconstructed images disrupts how spectators identifies these location and space. The displaced text, therefore, opens up different ways of narration and interpretation.
Sketching Time and Space
Going back to the intersecting traits of Photography and the subjective “Post Truths”, Byrne’s groundbreaking way of composition is through “completely forget(ing) that it is a photo, and do(ing) it like the process of trying to figure out the picture using drawing” Breaking away from the shackles imposed by the optical restrictions and camera equipment, Byrne reconfigures and remixes the images, transforming the images from objectivity into the realm of artistic interpretation. Turning Byrne’s work into the state of “photograph adjacent” Besides collaging, we can trace the very same sensibility and characteristics all the way to his early series of aleatory point and shoot.
George Byrne longed to materialize a beautiful inner world through image creation. And indeed through image creation, the creative process of shooting and collaging, his personal aesthetic gradually forms. In his eyes, “the camera is like a pencil sketch, able to truly depict the scene.” Images of reality, overcoming objectivity, can only rise from the depth of the mind through the raw ‘depiction of seeing’. The reason why sketching is full of vitality is that sketching is a process of incubation and constant formation. You can start from anywhere on the paper to capture and create possibilities. In addition to the changes in light, shadow, and shape, perhaps the most critical skill that sketching offers to photography is the concept of reflexivity and observation.
The famous photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once wrote in his photography notes: “Photography is, for me, a spontaneous impulse coming from an ever-attentive eye, which captures the moment and its eternity. Drawing, with its graphology, elaborates what our consciousness grasps in an instant… Photography is an immediate reaction, drawing a meditation.” (2)
George Byrne is fascinated by the unexpected found in landscapes. The unexpectedness is to chance framing what traveling is to photography; what pencil is to sketching: a moment of approximated perception.
Perhaps beneath the pastel innocence and the layback vibe is a question that Byrne perpetually asks: what messages do these images communicate to the viewers? In a complex and chaotic world, if harmonic ideals can truly be attained in these images, by the deployment of nothing but minute elements, perhaps the spectators would then share with Byrne the same longing to preserve what’s beautiful. Byrne’s works evoke an aesthetic experience that is universal, morphing the most basic into the everyday, earnestly imploring the viewers to cultivate an eye for art in their surroundings.
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(1) See “A History of Pictures” by David Hockney and Martin Gayford; translated by Han, Shu-Yen. Taipei: Cube Press, 2017, p. 20.
(2) See “L’imaginaire d’après nature” by Henri Cartier-Bresson, translated by Chang, Li-Hao & Su, Wei-Jen, Taipei: Uni-Books, 2014, p. 41.
