Flesh Cloud #1 (2003), Anders Krisar (James Marlow Formal Critique)

Flesh Cloud #1 (2003), Anders Krisar

Swedish artist Anders Krisar’s photographic work, Flesh Cloud #1 (2003), is located outside Grinnell College’s Faulconer Gallery. A large format work, Flesh Cloud #1 is a C-Print under glass, mounted on medium-density fiberboard, and has an exceptionally glossy surface that produces a fascinating interplay with the light in the surrounding space. Formally, the work depicts an urban setting, with the top half of the photograph dominated by the red brick of what appears to be a nineteenth-century warehouse, while the the bottom half is defined by the light greys of a cobblestone street. Bridging these two color fields together is a nebulous, transparent field of beige, a seemingly ephemeral form without definition or a representational identity. Within the cloud itself, two lighter beige forms are present, the lengthwise nature of which only serve to reinforce the horizontality of the composition at large. It is unclear whether the presence of this disruptive cloud is the result of an additive process added to an initial photograph, or whether the abstract form is the result of a long exposure of a moving body, producing this notion of a diffuse cloud-like object.

Stylistically, Krisar’s work holds an affinity with other artists who have used representational photography as a means to approach abstraction, such as Gerhard Richter or Andreas Gursky. Richter utilizes a technique in which he replicated photographs in paintings, and then distorts them with a blur, while Gursky attempts to explore the postmodern sublime through photographic means, decontextualizing the familiar visual language of urbanism and capitalism, by searching for abstract patterns within them. Krisar’s work may have less of an inherent narrative behind his use of abstract forms within representational photography, but a formal relationship is present within the work. Through the incorporation of an abstract body within the work, Krisar is able to transform the familiar visual language of urban masonry into an abstracted field of color.