Non Facturé
An exhibition of paintings of photographs, 2007
Non Facturé (meaning not charged) is a term used by French photo laboratories for images that are not suitable for printing because they exhibit optical artifacts such as being out of focus or accidentally cropped. This term highlights a central notion of this work, which is that often defective images have a spontaneous unexpected quality that would be impossible to achieve on purpose. This body of work explores the optical artifact, defective image and the mundane or incidental subject as a vehicle for sublime and sometimes meaningful representation. Paintings are executed with traditional mediums such as oil and watercolours. The artist undermines these 'high' traditions of representation by illusionisticly rendering with high fidelity to the source, paintings drawn from photographic subjectmatter that is flawed by some or other optical or digital artifact.
The show was opened by Professor David Bunn, then of the Wits School of Arts, on the 19th of August at the Gordart Gallery in Melville.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Crash 1- Low Res Photograph of Toyota Condor
Flattened by Rock Dumper, 2007. Watercolour.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Crash 2- Low Res Photograph of Toyota Condor
Flattened by Rock Dumper, 2007. Watercolour.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Dying Eland with Flash 2006. Oil on canvas.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Non Facturé (installation view) 2007.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Non Facturé (installation view) 2007.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Non Facturé (installation view) 2007.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Non Facturé (installation view) 2007.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Low Res Long Exposure with Motion Blur of
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Ann-Marie Tully, Long Exposure: Tracer Fire over Simons Town, 2007.
Oil on Canvas.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Koeburg Refinery Nocturne: Long Exposure, 2007.
Oil on Canvas.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Monkey Exhibit with Flash and
Motion Blur,
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Ann-Marie Tully, Newsprint Rodeo, 2007. Oil on canvas.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Photographers Reflection, 2007. Oil on Canvas.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Night Frog with Flash, 2007. Oil on paper.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Point of Light: Street Lamp and Polerised Sky,
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Ann-Marie Tully, Port Window: Low Light Approach @ Variable Zoom,
JHB International, 2007. Oil on Paper.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Port Window: Low Light Approach
@ Variable Zoom, JHB International, 2007 (detail).
Oil on Paper.
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Ann-Marie Tully, Port Window: Low Light Approach @
Variable Zoom, JHB International, 2007 (detail).
Oil on Paper.
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Check out Brenden Grey's review on Art Throb:
H:\Art\Non Facture' Exhibition 2007\Optical Artifact Press Release\A R T T H R O B _ R E V I E W S _ G A U T E N G.mht
Optical Artifact: A Post Script to David Hockney
-An essay by Ann-Marie Tully
This body of work entitled Non Facturé, explores the camera or optical artifact as a device and the notion of the mundane or incidental subject as a vehicle for sublime and sometimes meaningful interpretation and representation. Non Facturé meaning Not Charged is a term used by French photo laboratories for images that are not suitable for printing because they exhibit optical artifacts such as being out of focus, blurred or accidental cropping. This term highlights a central notion of this work, which is that often defective images have a spontaneous unexpected quality that would be impossible to achieve on purpose. Back flare, flare, halos, soft focus, breathing lenses, vertical smear, to name but a few- I love them all as much for their novel beauty as for their tendency to upstage their master-the suspension of disbelief. It therefore became important for me to find a way to reveal their inherent beauty and the possibility for explaining the world that I see in optical artifacts. However very early on I dismissed the idea of using the photograph alone to this end and realised the importance of an intervention in this case painting.
It is worth stating that in many cases of contemporary art the photograph is the finished artistic observation. So why do these artifacted photographs need intervention? Every day we are bombarded with a plethora of photographic imagery and the inevitable consequence of this is that we are conditioned to recognize an artifacted, unusually composed or incidental image as a negative. We are therefore desensitised to the beauty inherent in say an out of focus image or halo effect, a digital vertical smear, reduced depth of field or the unearthly quality of an over exposed image or a low resolution digital print. I believe that in our conditioned negation of these artifacted images we miss the possibility for perceiving personal or other significance in an incidental or artifacted photograph. In order to generate enough bad photographs I have purchased a digital camera which I take everywhere and snap away, often consciously trying to create a camera artifact such as flash or cropped composition etc. I also appropriate bad photographs that friends have taken. There is something exiting about a photograph that is from outside of your direct experience as it is undoubtedly open to more projection.
Another important aspect of this work is the irony of rendering seemingly undeserving content with the long standing and esteemed practice of oil painting. This parody is amusing and also positions this work within the discourse of reinventing painting, virtuosity and the painted subject in the age of the anti-artist. It also again begs the question: would the irony of displaying these bad photographs in the gallery context not be enough to carry the work as a finished product and overcome the desensitised viewer? Perhaps it would, but in this instance my sense is that there is more to recommend painting. In keeping with this medium vs. subject matter tongue in cheek dichotomy, I have also used watercolours, deliberately subverting the mediums granny-kitsch associations by painting artifacted and unlikely subjects as well as breaking the rules of the medium by employing an oil based layering and glazing technique in the exposition of the works.
In her memoirs entitled Vivre avec Picasso Francois Gilot said: and then I understood what painting really meant. It’s not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires (1965).What Gilot noted here was that painting is a psychologically profound practice. It allows us to intervene and shape the world in a tactile way perhaps not free from technique, but certainly free from mechanical restraints such as those associated with photography. As a modernist and a romantic she is no doubt also positioning painters as intervening agents in a world that too often leaves us feeling like victims, picturing the world as we see it beautiful and terrible, through our inner eye. This statement seems ironic when applied to my work which mimetically and with no small measure of OCD replicates the frame, colour and simulacrum of the photograph with no deviation or alteration from the image as the lens saw it –no inner eye here. The way I see it, the magic that Gilot talks about is relevant to my work in that the very act of painting the photograph, allows me the painter and the viewer to see the artifacted image with new eyes. The important factor here is: surface. The surface of the printed photograph and evermore increasingly the virtual photograph that will never be printed into physical reality, present the viewer with a smooth commercial surface; while the painted surface bears the marks of its moment of invention. In this age where virtual technology and slick glossy media has completely squashed any trace of the maker’s energy in the time of making, painting reintroduces us to the trace of human enterprise and desire and as such breathes new life into these fascinating, beautiful and often unearthly optical artefacts that allow us to glimpse the world in a way that our own eyes never could.
This brings me to the reference in the title to David Hockney, namely A Post Script to David Hockney. In this sub clause I am drawing attention to his recent and highly acclaimed book, Secret Knowledge: Rediscovering the Lost Techniques of the Old Masters published by Thames and Hudson in 2001 and 2006. In this ground breaking thesis he sets about analysing the works of the 'masters' from as early as the proto renaissance up to the romantic period in the 18th Century. He proposes and shows considerable evidence for the use of optical devices such as the Camera Lucida and the convex mirror’d Camera Obscura. He shows strange incongruities that can only be attributed to optical artifacts in paintings produced by painters as diverse in period and output as Holbein, Carravagio and Ingres. He shows how they may have used these optical devices to aid and improve their naturally observed production and eliminate stylistic awkwardness in their representations, while still allowing for skilfulness of mark making. It is a fantastic book in so many ways, but its most important contribution is to connect photography or optics to the practice of painting. He has established a long history of connectedness between two giants of representation that have for most of art history been separate entities. As a cinematographer and painter I have always sensed the connectedness of two practices that are essentially made of the same stuff: light, colour and composition. In the past innumerable scholars were taught that Impressionism sprung up as a reaction against photography. We were told that since the photograph could replicate the illusionism that painting had previously prided itself on in less than a second that painting veered towards more visible brush mark as a last stab at reinventing a dying art. In light of Hockney’s publication it seems obvious that the influence of photography has constituted a holistic and positive force not a violently and opposing dichotomy. In my mind the Impressionists did not react violently to photography; they in fact tried to mimic the speed of the camera in generating a slice of life and felt liberated from smooth surfaces, since photographs achieved a slickness that no painter could match. Photography has since then played an integral role in the development of painting from post impressionism to photorealism. It has replaced the Camera Lucida as a reference and resource for working and more recently contemporary painterly work has looked to the photograph as a primary subject matter for its often lacklustre quality, commercialisation, archival reference and the altered and often distanced vision of the lens. During the course of post modernity it has at several times seemed that painting really was dead and that photography had replaced its position in the canon of art, but it continues to rear its head. It seems to me that the photographic image is riding high and is set to stay in the world of high art, but this is by no means a guarantee that painting is dead, to the contrary it is a guarantee that painting lives. Wherever the developments of the two mediums go in years to come they will always at specific moments invoke each other as they are historical partners, doomed to repetition.
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