#fromanger.gerard

[aamjp]

Fromanger, Desire is Everywhere

A single press photograph, painting a number of times, titled differently (Street of the Rainy Season, Street of My Village Street of the Desert, Street of My People)

Cf. Foucault’s Photogenic Painting.

[aamjp]

Michel Foucault, ‘Photogenic Painting’

The circulation of images:

“Pop art and hyper-realism have re-taught us the love of images. And not through a return to figuration, not through a rediscovery of the object with its real density, but by plugging it into the unending circulation of images. [... It] is a way of painting their images and highflying them as images within paintings.

[...]

“Pop artists and hyper-realists paint images. They do not integrate the images to their technique of painting; they stretch them out in a great wash of images. Their painting marks a stage in this unending process. [... What] they produce when their work is done is not a painting made from a photograph, not a photograph made up into a painting, but an image seized in the middle of its trajectory from photograph to painting. [... The] new painting carries itself lightly in the midst of the movement of images which it itself makes happen.” (5)

“[Through Fromanger’s painting, the event within the photo] slips through his hands, is sheaved, achieves its infinite speed, instantly joins and multiples points and time, generates a people of gestures and looks, outlines a thousand possible paths between them” (7)

There’s a continual exchange happening between viewer and the image. Is this in a Barthes-ian sense?

“[Fromanger looks] for the event that is taking place and that continually takes place in the picture because of the picture”. (6)

“[Fromager’s interventions] give rise [...] to an unlimited series of new passages. To create by the short circuiting of photo and colour, not the falsified identity of the old photo-painting, but a locus from which myriad images can gush forth”. (6-7)

Through the combination of text (in the the title) and a series of paintings based on the same image:

“Images, which the spectator does not see, come from the depths of space and, from some obscure source, mange to spring from one unique photo to diverge into different paintings, each of which in turn could lead to a new series, a new dispersal of events. [...] The profoundness of photography from which painting tears unknown secrets? No; but the opening up of photography by a painting which, through itself, calls and transmits unlimited images.” (8)

Foucault, Michel. 1989 (1975). ‘Photogenic Painting’, translated by Pierre A. Walker. Critical Texts, 6 (3): 1-12.

A better translation:

“Pop artists and hyperrealists paint images. They do not however incorporate images through their painting technique, but extend technique itself into the great sea of images, where their paintings act as a relay in this endless circulation. [… What] they have produced when their work is at an end is not a painting based on a photograph, nor a photograph made up to look like a painting, but an image caught in its trajectory from photograph to painting. [… The] new painting takes its place enthusiastically in the circulation of images which it does its own part to drive on.” — Photogenic Painting: Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Gerard Fromanger (Black Dog: London, 1999), p. 91.