REVIEWS
KURT RALSKE
YOUNG PROJECTS - LOS ANGELES
“The Mechanical Bride” is the first solo show of New York-based visual artist Kurt Ralske. The title refers to the homonym Marshall McLuhan’s 1951 book, emphasizing his intention to investigate the hidden meaning found within the images that belong to the common imaginary. Ralske’s creative process is based on photographs and videos from master cinematographers of the past like Gillo Pontecorvo or F.W. Murnau, in a constant dialogue between past and present. Most of Ralske’s
work deals with analyzing, decomposing, and recomposing preexisting cinematographic sequences using custom designed software to create a new visual universe by dissolving sound and images. He condenses the brightest shots of Tokyo Story (1953) the slowest shots of Equinox Flower, (1958) or the longest shots of Early Summer (1951) by director Yasujiro Ozu, rendering intense black and white or bright abstract mosaics in a continuous fluid motion, where organic geometrical shapes and human silhouettes seem to pour down the screen at a slow pace. Ralske’s flow of images blurs the borders between painterly static images and digital motion. The second section of the exhibition pays a tribute to the work of German special effects expert Eugen Schüfftan. Ralske’s work suggests images that blend the original figures, by disrupting the first inten-
tion of Schüfftan’s sequences from 1929. His method represents the ideal extension of the infamous Schüfftan Process, a technical procedure designed to create multiple exposure on a single image used by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927. Through visual, temporal and physical distortions, simple daily gestures are multiplied into infinity, revealing a sensual cosmos populated by ghosts without faces who epitomize pure expressive entities. Ralkse’s technique brings what he calls “the relics of cinematic history” back to a new digital life, where the perception of time is replaced by simultaneity. Ralske combines modern cutting edge technology with classic experimental films of the past just as a physician would use an endoscope to scrutiny a sick body. His work is a study that oscillate between the elegy of the past and the present, while questioning the inner foundations of our process of visual perception and historical memory. Patrick Steffen KURT RALSKE, “The Mechanical Bride,” 2011. Video installation, view at Young Projects at Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles.
AHMED ALSOUDANI
HAUNCH OF VENISON - LONDON Iraqi-American Ahmed Alsoudani is showing for the first time at Haunch of Venison. Alsoudani’s substantial canvases — placed at pivotal intervals on two of the three floors of this renovated Georgian townhouse (originally Admiral Nelson’s living quarters) — are in part neutralized by their sterile surroundings to such an extent that they appear unintentionally emptied of their morose drama. It may be that the walls should have been painted a deeper color, or the lighting dimmed dramatically in order to elevate these tormented works; but as they are, they barely manage to generate the outrage they intend. Installation choices aside, Alsoudani’s canvases do recall something of the grotesque theater of early German Expressionism, particularly Max Beckmann, George Grosz and Otto Dix. Yet Alsoudani’s clear resolve to complete canvases with bright, even washes of color make these works less intense. There isn’t a feeling of utter foreboding that wills you further into these paintings. Untitled (2011) is a work in which a gagged and demented head appears on a chopping block with a set of contoured hands cradling
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a baby cactus. The image references R.B. Kitaj, as Alsoudani’s estranged figure appears to have lost all sense of humanity and has instead metamorphosed into a tragic Dr. Jekyll character. Another work, in which the lower part of the canvas is portioned off with a landscape of tree stumps, is then littered in the adjoining two thirds of the canvas with deflated animal skins, glass bottles and threads of colored pipe; a textured mix of man-made artifacts with human and animal body parts that suggest something more sinister. Yet the depraved ugliness of this work is curtailed by Alsoudani’s palette, in which colors that should be deeply unappealing are too warm, thus divorcing the content from the visual experience. Untitled (2011) is another sizable work of mummified heads, detached or loosely attached limbs and blood bags that have all been pressed together as a disassembled mess onto canvas: a troubling reality that the artist wants to allude to from a safe distance. Rajesh Punj AHMED ALSOUDANI, Untitled, 2011. Charcoal and acrylic on canvas, 152 x 135 cm. Courtesy Haunch of Venison, London / New York. Photo: Peter Mallet.
• JANUARY FEBRUARY 2012
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