Konrad Fischer Galerie is pleased to present for the first time works by Jan Dibbets (born 1941, lives and works in Amsterdam) from the series BOU and Final as well as the work RR Variations in the exhibition "Billions of Universes“.
From analog to digital, a tale of autonomization
In late 1975, Jan Dibbets embarked on a new series, Colorstudies, that constituted a sharp break with the direction introduced in his photographic work eight years earlier. Produced from close-up views of car hoods, the works in question led to numerous iterations that he would pursue until 1976. Diametrically opposed to the sobriety of black and white one might expect from a so-called photo-conceptualist, the Colorstudies—too disconnected from the artist’s austere and “linear” works, and dissociated from any predetermined “concept”—unsettle. In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that they were a critical and commercial failure, although the artist had simply pushed his “program” of deconstructing the photographic image to the extreme.
From there, it is hardly surprising that Jan Dibbets produced his first digital images in the 2010s based on a negative taken in 1976 of the hood of a Saab. Having scarcely taken any photographs since the early twenty-first century, the artist has, with few exceptions, confined himself in recent years to reusing old negatives, thus demonstrating that all of his previous research is necessarily incomplete and infinite, in the fullest sense of the word. But ten years ago, nothing made it possible to predict that Dibbets would one day risk moving away from images which until recently, by virtue of the laws of analog photography, remained “realistic,” even if in fact, he had strongly disengaged himself from such an approach with the Colorstudies by opening his subject to an “abstract” dimension.
Realistic. Abstract. We know these terms are irrelevant in relation to Dibbets’ approach, that what ultimately matters to him is to circumscribe and show data from a photographic program and method—analog until the early 2010s, digital after he delved into post-photographic territories. And finally, in both periods, he invites us into the same deconstruction. When he first veered off into digital photography, the images were still “legible.” They affirmed a transitional phase that gradually made it possible to mourn the loss of analog photography. The colors changed, the formats increased, but the traceability between his sources and the images they generated was respected at all times. This respect can also be found in his remarkable series of tributes to his friend Robert Ryman, conceived by Dibbets based on one of Ryman’s paintings (more precisely, a photograph of it) found in his own collection. Here the artist tried his hand at mimicry, taking the exact dimensions of Ryman’s work and the aluminum strip comprising its unpainted areas and, via digital processing, converting them into chromatic variations that are all the more ironic because they are completely dissociated from the color white typical of this New York painter’s oeuvre.
In the other series presented in this exhibition, this respect for traceability is undermined. The negative used in all these works is the same, that of the Saab. But by “detracting” from his digital project, Dibbets has produced images that reflect a degree of autonomy never before seen in his work. In his most recent series, the link between the photographed thing and (post)photographic reality is therefore no longer traceable and furthermore, no longer visible. It is not even possible to assert that this link is interrupted; it would be more accurate to say that it is profoundly corrupted. Therein lies, undoubtedly, the price for a body of work based on deconstruction and initiated more than fifty years ago in a decidedly different context.
- Erik Verhagen
With the kind support of
From analog to digital, a tale of autonomization
In late 1975, Jan Dibbets embarked on a new series, Colorstudies, that constituted a sharp break with the direction introduced in his photographic work eight years earlier. Produced from close-up views of car hoods, the works in question led to numerous iterations that he would pursue until 1976. Diametrically opposed to the sobriety of black and white one might expect from a so-called photo-conceptualist, the Colorstudies—too disconnected from the artist’s austere and “linear” works, and dissociated from any predetermined “concept”—unsettle. In retrospect, it comes as no surprise that they were a critical and commercial failure, although the artist had simply pushed his “program” of deconstructing the photographic image to the extreme.
From there, it is hardly surprising that Jan Dibbets produced his first digital images in the 2010s based on a negative taken in 1976 of the hood of a Saab. Having scarcely taken any photographs since the early twenty-first century, the artist has, with few exceptions, confined himself in recent years to reusing old negatives, thus demonstrating that all of his previous research is necessarily incomplete and infinite, in the fullest sense of the word. But ten years ago, nothing made it possible to predict that Dibbets would one day risk moving away from images which until recently, by virtue of the laws of analog photography, remained “realistic,” even if in fact, he had strongly disengaged himself from such an approach with the Colorstudies by opening his subject to an “abstract” dimension.
Realistic. Abstract. We know these terms are irrelevant in relation to Dibbets’ approach, that what ultimately matters to him is to circumscribe and show data from a photographic program and method—analog until the early 2010s, digital after he delved into post-photographic territories. And finally, in both periods, he invites us into the same deconstruction. When he first veered off into digital photography, the images were still “legible.” They affirmed a transitional phase that gradually made it possible to mourn the loss of analog photography. The colors changed, the formats increased, but the traceability between his sources and the images they generated was respected at all times. This respect can also be found in his remarkable series of tributes to his friend Robert Ryman, conceived by Dibbets based on one of Ryman’s paintings (more precisely, a photograph of it) found in his own collection. Here the artist tried his hand at mimicry, taking the exact dimensions of Ryman’s work and the aluminum strip comprising its unpainted areas and, via digital processing, converting them into chromatic variations that are all the more ironic because they are completely dissociated from the color white typical of this New York painter’s oeuvre.
In the other series presented in this exhibition, this respect for traceability is undermined. The negative used in all these works is the same, that of the Saab. But by “detracting” from his digital project, Dibbets has produced images that reflect a degree of autonomy never before seen in his work. In his most recent series, the link between the photographed thing and (post)photographic reality is therefore no longer traceable and furthermore, no longer visible. It is not even possible to assert that this link is interrupted; it would be more accurate to say that it is profoundly corrupted. Therein lies, undoubtedly, the price for a body of work based on deconstruction and initiated more than fifty years ago in a decidedly different context.
- Erik Verhagen
With the kind support of
