Scanning the Surface

In the upper left corner: a photograph, a rather blurry black and white picture of a field. In the distance, a fence runs across the hills. A rainbow forms a stark contrast to the visibly old and slightly warped paper print which has lost its left edge. The picture is greyish, nondescript, but also somehow sharply focussed black. A few odd details, spots, a fingerprint. Nothing more. A work by Marieta Chirulescu.

Untitled (2010) was included in Chirulescu’s exhibition in fall 2010 at Kunsthalle Basel. She based the picture on a found photograph, which she laid on the scanner, leaving the lid open so that the print could curl up. The rainbow over the photograph is a reflection formed when the laser hits the coated photographic paper, and the black is the open space where the machine’s light got lost. The blemishes are bits of dirt on the uncleaned glass plate. The picture brings together depth and flatness, unites the fuzzy warmth of analogue technologies and the cuttingly cold accuracy of digital laser scanning. Two techniques of making and reproducing pictures are combined and exposed via a self-reflexive twist: analogue photography with its material residue, an aging paper print, and the digital scanner, its glass interface revealed by traces of use.

Chirulescu often makes use of these two reprographic technologies in combination with others. She scans old photographs in a way that brings their materiality to the fore, treating them more like objects than pictures, as in this untitled work. She photocopies paper, once, twice, many times, until the surface structure changes. The resulting ‘pictures’ are either printed onto canvas, contrasting with the support’s own structure, or stuck on as printouts. Or she scans a mirror or another sheet of glass. Sometimes the sheets of glass bear traces of leftover paint, sometimes there is coloured paper behind them. But sometimes there is nothing. Chirulescu goes so far as to leave the photocopier open or the scanner empty, resulting in pictures that show grey gradations of surrounding space, or bits of dirt and dust found on the inside of the scanner lid. This raw material (photographs, photocopies, scanned sheets of glass, paper with a specific structure or just an empty picture produced by the machines) then undergoes further processing: layers become surfaces, irregularities (edges, folds, dust, dirt, graininess) become gestures. A frame, a composition. 
A kind of semiautomatic and mostly abstract painting is assembled.

With Chirulescu’s working method, viewers often feel compelled to dismantle her compositions, step by step, as if the work would be easier to grasp when broken down into its constituent parts. They seek refuge in the vocabulary 
of technical description, at best pinning her work to a media-reflexive engagement with the conditions of picture-making. She is said to practice some kind of ironic, second-order painting. But perhaps the more important question here is what is put together and how – and not so much how it can be taken apart again. In other words: however much Chirulescu’s work refers to the media conditions of picture-
making, it is at least as much concerned with making pictures that do justice 
to these media conditions.

That’s a minor shift, admittedly, but one that brings a change of perspective: instead of favouring the digital over the analogue, this shift frees Chirulescu’s pictures from the need to justify themselves in terms of such oppositions and the need to strive for relevance, as one might say of Wade Guyton’s inkjet painting. Instead of playing the copy against the original as a knee-jerk attack on an obsolete notion of authorship, Chirulescu incorporates reprographic techniques (both digital and analogue) in her work as a matter of course. Relinquishing authorial control does not mean that the resulting works are no longer originals. She uses reprographic procedures as technology, and not as a theme, which allows her not only to fulfil current standards of media reflexivity but also to avoid the danger (and restriction) of constantly needing to evoke them as a conceptual reference. Chirulescu’s works adopt techniques of reproduction without becoming inauthentic. In much of her oeuvre, she retains an almost classical, intuitive model for developing motifs, many of which are arrived at by chance, by trying things out, with a certain laissez-faire attitude.

Chirulescu’s solo exhibition at the Nürnberger Kunstverein in the summer of 2011 also gave a sense of the natural ease with which she combines almost classical abstract painting with state-of-the-art digital image production and a particular feel for questions of space. This sense began with the artist’s decision not to repaint the walls, the phantom image created by patches and traces of the previous show’s hanging providing a backdrop for her own works. Confusing details, imperfections were deliberately left on the usually plain, neutral walls of the white cube – very similar to what can be found on her own canvases and prints. In one room, she showed five small-format works, all Untitled (2011). Just as her compositional techniques expand beyond the edge of the picture onto the wall, these pictures do the opposite, bringing the frame into the picture. Three of the works duplicated it by drawing in an additional ‘frame’ around a regular, off-centre surface, be it a scanned sheet of glass, an area of dark blue or a digital fill pattern.

Chirulescu avoids filling her art with ‘themes’ by refusing to arrange her works in series, even when strong formal resemblances exist (like in the above-mentioned ‘frame series’ or in a 2010 group of mostly untitled works featuring abstract geometrical shapes on a grey-black ground). Instead of individual, distinct groups of works dealing with ‘this’ or ‘that’ theme, there is a large, almost organic continuum of pictures and techniques (scans of photographs, photocopies, classical oil paintings, prints, computer-generated images, Photoshop compositions) which overlap and complement one another, which are deployed non-
hierarchically, side-by-side. Ultimately, Chirulescu’s pictures are founded on abstract conceptual choices: What is a picture? What is a medium? What materiality do things possess, and how can this materiality be used in compositions? None of these questions becomes an identifiable guiding concept. Instead Chirulescu focuses on making pictures – in a way that is firmly in touch with the present.