NYAB Event - Delphine Burtin “Encouble”

Delphine Burtin “Encouble”

Benrubi Gallery

This event has ended.

Duchamp’s readymades meet Burroughs’ cut-ups in Encouble, the first show of photographs in the United States by Swiss-French artist Delphine Burtin.

Merging photography with collage and construction, Burtin’s art blurs the line between image and sculpture, between intention and, in the artist’s phrase, “accident.” Dynamic geometries, by turns as playful as Paul Klee and somber as Agnes Martin, gloss an illusion of order over images whose fluid forms continually invite and rebuff identification and interpretation. Some subjects are photographed as still lives, their status as objects—indeed, as shapes—undermined by deft choices of composition, angle, light. Others are intensely reworked—manually manipulated, photographed and rephotographed until the original object (if such a concept even applies here) is subsumed beneath layers of abstraction. The photographs become object and subject both: mysterious chromatic arrangements whose Benjaminian aura persists even as the they cohere and dissolve into and out of quotidian solidity, or familiar artifacts whose materiality becomes increasingly conjectural under what Duchamp might call retinal examination. Antiheroic in scale, semiotically monumental, and suffused with a wry wit both philosophical and visual in nature, these remarkable transubstantiatations audaciously efface the noumenal world while simultaneously adding to it.