Carl Chiarenza “Selected Works”

Alan Klotz Gallery

[Image: Carl Chiarenza "Untitled 253" (1994)]

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Carl Chiarenza is a photographic renaissance man. He is first and foremost a terrifically inventive, and endlessly curious maker of photographic images. Garry Winogrand was fond of saying, when asked why he shot a particular scene, that “I wanted to see what that looked like photographed”. There’s a lot packed into that little zinger, about photography, representation, transformation, and the object that is the resulting photograph. Although it isn’t always obvious, Carl is really a concrete kind of guy. He makes, and works from collages that he constructs from this and that, sometimes literally from garbage, and torn scraps. The act of photographing these collages, stimulates the artist’s mind, first, while constructing them, then, while transforming them into a new object, the photograph, which refers grudgingly back to the objects of which they are reflections, (Chiarenza says he does not keep the collages. He throws them away…ashes to ashes, as it were), but now they are something else, something “other”. They have become vessels containing wonder, and mystery. Einstein said, “One of the most beautiful things we can experience is the mysterious,…. It is the source of all true science and art. He who can no longer pause to wonder is as good as dead.” Chiarenza doesn’t just pause there…he lives there!

He has been a teacher of others, too, who are interested in exploring the same, or rather adjacent territory. They are taking temporary advantage of Carl as their guide. Teaching is a wonderful arena, full of richness and opportunity. One in which the teacher gets as much as he gives…usually more. It forces the instructor to organize and give shape to all the disparate, yet connected, shards of thought and factoids of experience, previously floating around in his mind. These components, used to drifting in vague association with each other, rather like a constellation, an outline rather than a description, now, suddenly, become a map…something one can follow. And at the same time it gives the teacher the satisfaction of bringing others along with him…nurturing that next generation of seekers. So too, the dialogue, between work and self, is now expanded, as well as extended. Don’t people who do this go straight to heaven?

If all this were not enough, he is also is a prolific author, not just of compendiums of his own work, yet there are many, but also as the critically acclaimed biographer of the work of his friend and mentor, Aaron Siskind. It’s hard to imagine what more you could want to know about this great Abstract Expressionist than what Chiarenza has put between the covers of, Aaron Siskind, Pleasures and Terrors. It is both rigorous and exhilarating.

Chiarenza’s photographs depart from the facts contained therein. The facts form an architecture, which provides structure, without needing to over-explain itself. We are looking at landscapes that never were, and objects of questionable utility. Exploring these images is like studying the disparity between what we know, or what we think we know, and what we feel…a different order of cognition entirely. It is a world of imagination elegantly described, without sacrificing its mystery. The images point outward from themselves, to other visual sensations, and worldly references: eg. music, poetry, love.