Thomas Demand's show of ten lithographs at Gemini G.E.L. is called Portals, promising entry, spatial and fictonal. They are small, fine pieces, each the size of a dinner tray, and would make a handsome folio if bound. But they are curiously inert; they don't pull one in the way the artist's better-known photographs do.
Demand became reknown for photographing elaborate three-dimensional paper models that he built to represent landscapes and interiors from existing photographs. He constructed these models with such care and verisimilitude, and composed the photographs so expertly, that one feels they're looking at a suburban house or corporate office or oceanscape, and not at a photograph of a paper fabrication of one.
The prints in this show are more deeply synthetic, one step further removed: they are representations of photographs of paper models of photographs. They present such small bites of larger structures that no perspective is apparent; the scenes lie still. The compositions have an exhausted spatiality, symbolizing depth without simulating it. One recognizes in them the corners of a glass and steel skyscraper and the slate tiles of a steeple. But if one squints the print falls into a pattern, doesn't resemble anything at all.
Demand takes as his subject types of archetypal structures: skyscraper, courthouse, church, cruise ship, dormitory, aquatics center, border wall. Though based on a photograph of one particular cruise ship the print here offers up the idea of cruise ship. And we're not really looking at a cruise ship, we don't experience the pleasure of optical survey, of a world opening up in front. Instead the print remains inert, an opaque vertical surface.
But these images aren't cold; they have the softness of remembered places. From a few steps away one could mistake them for very fine watercolors. One searches within them and holds onto them longer than Demand's monumental photographs. In remaining purposefully generic and showing only one small part of a structure, they trigger memory and story. Is someone staying late at this office on the thirty-sixth floor, stealing files to make a legal claim? Is a guest in this hotel room hiding under the covers, crying on the morning before their wedding? These works don't open themselves visually all-at-once, like a photograph does, but more slowly, deeply, imaginatively.
Thomas Demand, Diamond Princess, 2024, 10-color lithograph with embossing.
