|
C105
review
Dublin:
Eugenio Percossi
 |
| Eugenio
Percossi: Ipotesi, photographic manipulation
on canvas; courtesy Ashford Gallery |
Photographic
manipulation reminds us of the mythologising tendencies
and fabrications of history. Photorealism, à la Gerhard
Richter, conversely implies a veracity of representation.
Italian artist Eugenio Percossi explores and exploits
both techniques as he manipulates and re-portrays a series
of found photographs depicting 'ordinary' families of
the 1920s and '30s.
The images
are transferred to canvas both by chemical transfer and
through painting. Yet they are complicated by distortions
and manipulations, by which means Percossi implies and
draws out a sense of the distortions of history and memory.
Images are blurred and 'stretched', others (the acrylics
on canvas) are internally divided with barcode bars of
black and white - rather like when a fax machine gets
stuck.
These interpolations
on the original photographs are carried by the beauty
and technical skill of the works. The sepia-aged sense
of the satin-transferred images, and the haunting black
and white of the paintings remain in the mind, mingling
with a lingering uncertainty about our own ideas of continuity,
history and memory. Like a stuck fax machine, our communications
with the past are blurred and altered.
Gemma
Tipton is a writer.
Eugenio
Percossi, The End, Ashford Gallery,
Dublin, July 2003.
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