Shadow Play

to the Gallery  .....

For centuries, shadows have been cast in supporting roles playing the part of the silhouette, the eclipse, the haunted reflection, and even the evil twin. In fact the shadow was implicated in the many origin legends associated with the birth of the visual arts. Pliny the Elder, the famed historian of 1st century ancient Rome, wrote in his extensive studies, Natural History: "All agree that [the origin of the art of painting] began with tracing an outline around a man's shadow."¹ In the 14th century the Italian poet Dante reaffirmed that shadows were integral to depicting the human form, or as he called it, the "shadow of the flesh."² Other Renaissance masters such as Leonardo da Vinci uncovered shadows as elemental to what became the Italian Renaissance's trademark: spatial illusionism. Leonardo wrote "Shadows appear to me to be of supreme importance in perspective, because without them opaque and solid bodies will be ill defined."³ Leonardo developed fundamental techniques such as chiaroscuro (the distribution of light and shade in paintings or drawings) and atmospheric perspective (sfumato in Italian - the use of degrees of color to indicate distance) to create the illusion of limitless space.

With the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, artists began to explore different ways to use and create the shadow. At mid-century, the Impressionists sought to capture movement in their work to give a sense of fleeting time. They transformed the grey-brown static, academic shadow into brilliant pinks, purples and blues to suggest a view onto a scene that was ever changing. As it would happen the Impressionists also included their own shadows in their compositions to indicate their presence, or to allude to the spectator's presence. Similar with the invention and wide use of photography as an art form, the technical nature of the shadow as the compositional partner to light began to take on more and more expressive means.

In the 20th century many artists have made use of the shadow as a character in their paintings and sculpture. Picasso included his own shadow both to mimic the Impressionists and to emphasize his presence as creator and witness to what he perceived. In sculpture, Giacommeti's bronze figures suggest the figure not as heroic form but as a shadow of its self, a figure worn down by the strife of life in the post World War II era.

Picasso and Braque went one step further to experiment with shadows and developed within the means of Analytic Cubism a new method to portray depth and representation. For the Cubists, shadows became facetted spatial planes transformed into geometric areas of dark color; they painted the space in between objects. Picasso, Braque and other Cubists deconstructed the spatial illusionism of the past. By breaking the ideal of the painting's picture into space, they were seeking to represent several perspectives at once, compressing both time and space into a unified visual event. This play with representation and with shadows in particular drastically changed how successive generations of artists have viewed and depicted their subjects. The metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico used distorted shadows to evoke a symbolic yet haunting dream world. This dream/shadow analogy was later applied by the French Surrealists, who employed shadows as a reference to their dreams, a fascination made popular by the Surrealists interests in the writings of Sigmund Freud. Towards the end of the century in the 1970s, Andy Warhol made his first abstractions Shadows (1979) as a tribute to de Chirico's shadows. The Pop icon continued to explore the power of shadows in various series that followed: Torsos and Rorschach Tests for example.

The exhibition Shadow Play examines this phenomenon. Since the Microsoft Art collection primarily focuses on contemporary art, the artworks here offer a current, albeit brief, survey of some of the ways the shadow is dealt with by artists today. Much art today is photographic or print derived owing to the enormous appeal that contemporary art has to audiences worldwide. This demand is reflected in the kinds of work shown here; opening the way for artists to explore a greater diversity on the technical side of their work in order to achieve a greater purpose and meaning in their art.

Sculptor and photographer Mac Adams assembles ordinary, everyday objects, projects light on them to create shadows, and then photographs them. The result is "a kind of reverse chiaroscuro."⁴ The power of Adams' photographs is achieved through the disjunction he resolves between the abstract forms and materials he employs and the representational shadows he creates. Nonetheless, these forms demand more from the viewer than just a cursory glance. At first, there appears before the viewer jumbled mess of objects. The artwork only becomes complete when the viewer sorts through what has been presented and pieces together the puzzle parts into a coherent whole. The shadow becomes the emblem of what is seen.

David George also relies upon the engagement of the viewer when he constructs photograms. Photograms, "invented" nearly simultaneously by famed photographers Man Ray and Lazlo Moholy-Nagy,⁵ result from exposing light sensitive paper to light. Artists place objects between the light and the paper in order to capture (aspects of) their form. George's Score Series turns ordinary things into unidentifiable, organic shapes. If, as composer John Cage commented, Rauschenberg's White paintings were "landing strips for shadows,"⁶ George's photograms go one step further to trap shadows once they land. Similarly, Kunié Sugiura captures the essence of the form and outline of flowers in her photograms. While George is inspired by the waste of our culture, Sugiura is fixed on the poetics of nature. Both rely upon the shadow to speak volumes about line, color, texture, and the harmony between light and dark.

Several of the artists featured in Shadow Play utilize shadow as silhouetted form.

Because the shadow in silhouette is less abstract than its chiaroscuro counterpart, it has a more direct, indexical impact on the viewer. The eye naturally attempts to construct some sort of modeling within the silhouette, or a complete image of positive and negative. Robert Moskowitz's drawings of the recently destroyed twin towers of the World Trade Center rely on the viewer's desire to construct dimension within the silhouette. With the addition of a simple diagonal line, Moskowitz transforms the gestalt of a pair of minimal vertical forms into a complex silhouette of two remarkable rectangular structures. Moskowitz has said "When people look at my work, I want them just to discover it in a quiet way - not unlike when you're walking down the street and see something and then realize it's just there, in a very physical or literal way."⁷

French born, Israeli based photographer Didier Ben Loulou's silhouettes share the indexical quality of Moskowitz's drawings. In Ben Loulou's photographs, he uses the indexical quality to evoke what could best be termed "uncanny."⁸ The uncanny, as defined by Freud (part of which is the quality of 'double' or 'other') could be symbolized by the silhouette. Ben Loulou uses this type of symbolic structure in his photographs of the Arabs who live in the Muslim Quarter of the Old City of Jerusalem.⁹ In his photographs he contrasts the black silhouette with scarred and saturated colors. Through his imagery he seeks to express Jerusalem's ancient yet "different beauty [which comes] out of the horror, the chaos and the mourning"¹⁰ of recent times.

Eva Schlegel's fragmentary silhouettes have a softer and more translucent quality than those of Ben Loulou. Schlegel's domestic silhouettes in Shadow Play are part of a larger series she made focusing on portraits of women. Schlegel's work always begins as a photograph which she enlarges xerographically.¹¹ The image is then transferred to glass, or some other ground,¹² in an attempt to infuse the original image with greater depth and tactility. In her untitled series of portraits Schlegel reinforced the concept of the silhouette by printing them on glass. Her portraits achieve the opacity of a silhouette while at the same time her objects create shadows of their own.

Barbara Ess reverses the silhouette in her pinhole photographs. She frames four small images with shadow. This pinhole technique brings to mind the "tunnel"¹³ effect of the memory. Ess zooms in on the objects and imagery associated with childhood memories: a cartoon-like character of a duck or a close up of the pattern of the linoleum floor in her kitchen. The tension Ess creates between negative and positive images also suggests the negative and positive aspects of childhood itself.¹⁴

Alex Katz combines representation and abstraction in his latest series of linocuts Landscape, 2001. Katz takes inspiration from his environment which in this case is the grounds of his summer home in Maine.¹⁵ Katz depicts only the essential elements of what he sees; mixing black and white abstract shapes to reproduce recognizable landscape imagery. Landscape, 2001 demonstrates Katz's ability to convey a great deal of complexity through very simple forms and juxtapositions of light and shadow. George Rush is also at home when he is in his studio. The interiors he is known for are re-creations of "modernist" life culled from books and magazines. The interior setting is described in terms of the shadow of furniture and the view to the woods beyond the windows.

Enrique Martinez Celaya, Graciela Sacco and Liza Ryan treat shadows in a more conventional manner than do the other artists in Shadow Play. Martinez Celaya's A Voice To Speak belongs to the great Romantic tradition. In it he brings together figure and landscape defining it in terms of chiaroscuro drawing and a simple range of muted colors. Though the figure and ground are clearly differentiated in A Voice To Speak, they appear as smoky shadows. "Very often, my paintings are much more interesting or glamorous or sexy before I'm done with them," Martinez Celaya says. "What is left over is almost like a burned charcoal after a fire or something."¹⁶

Sharing in Martinez Celaya's scorched finish is Graciela Sacco's El incendio y las visperas, no. 7 (The fire and the day before, no. 7). Sacco works with heliography, a technique normally associated with architects and engineers in the creation of blueprints and mechanical drawings.¹⁷ Heliography allows Sacco to transfer photographs to other objects via light-reactive chemicals, effectively burning the images onto the surfaces she selects or finds.¹⁸ Sacco creates relationships between these images (appropriated and original) and the objects onto which she projects them. The transfer creates a grainy, shadowy image that suits her challenging, sociopolitical thinking and subject matter: the modern-day crowd.

Liza Ryan also broaches traditional subject matter in her photograph Witness #4. Ryan shrouds drawn curtains in shadow, focusing on the sliver of light shining through from the window behind. Suspense is built, not only between the gradient of light and shade (outside and inside), but also through Ryan's characteristically complex formal composition. Ryan creates great mystery through the use of cloth, light and shadow, three elements that appear constantly and consistently throughout the history of Western art.

Shadows have been captured everywhere on film, from the forests of Nepal (Kevin Bubriski) to the Nevada desert (Emett Gowin) and even the surface of the moon (Michael Light). In spite of the great dissimilarity among these places, the shadow remains a strange, provoking and endlessly fascinating subject. As is apparent in the selection of works for Shadow Play, when contemporary artists focus on the theme of shadows it is done with an eye toward innovation.

Michael Klein, Curator
Melinda Moshuk, Research Assistant 2001

For further reading see:

A short history of the shadow by Victor Stoichita. London: Reaktion Books, 1997.

Shadows and Enlightenment by Michael Baxandall. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1995.

Shadows: The Depiction of Cast Shadows in Western Art by E.H. Gombeck. London: National Gallery Publications, 1995.

1XXXV, 15.
2 Stoichita, Victor. A short history of the shadow. London: Reaktion Books, 1997. p. 45.
3 The Literary Works of Leonardo da Vinci, ed. J.P. Richter (New York, 1970), no. 111, p. 164.
4 Lynton, Norbert. "Mac Adams." In Mac Adams: the silence of shadows. Cardiff, U.K.: Cardiff Bay Arts Trust, 2000. p. 40.
5 Grundberg, Andy. "In an Experimental Mode: Modernist Roots and Postmodernist Branches." Departures, Photography 1923-1990. New York: Independent Curators Incorporated, 1991. p. 12.
6 John Cage. Krauss, Rosalind. "The Madness of the Day." In Andy Warhol: Diamond Dust Shadow Paintings. New York, NY: Gagosian Gallery, 2000. p. 13.
7 Zimmerman, David. USA TODAY. (1990, February 7).
8 Stoichita, p. 133.
9 Ofrat, Gideon. "The Writing on the Wall." In A Touch of Grace: Poems by Yehuda Amichai, Photographs by Didier Ben Loulou. Schocken Publishing House Ltd. (2000, Summer).
10 Ibid.
11 A method of photocopying in which the image is formed by attracting a resinous powder to an electrostatically charged plate, then transferred to paper and fixed by heating. Encarta World English Dictionary.
12 Information about Eva Schlegel from Margarete Roeder Gallery. http://www.roedergallery.com.
13 Diehl, Carol. "Barbara Ess at Curt Marcus." Art in America. (1998, September).
14 Ibid.
15 "Alex Katz, Landscape, (2001)." Art On Paper. (2001, July-August), p. 62-63.
16 Rosenberg, Jeremy. "The Evolution of Enrique." Los Angeles Times. (2001, March 7), p. F2.
17 Castle, Frederick Ted. "Graciela Sacco at World House." Art in America. (2001, February).
18 Rexer, Lyle. "Bringing Argentina Out of the Shadows." New York Times, (2000, July 9).