Truncated abstraction.

Last summer, while I was living for a moment in Chelsea, Christian Erroi had a show up at Michael Mazzeo. The pieces on display – from his series “As Above” – were both exquisitely light and unusually solid.

The photographs, at the simplest level, were composed of pieces of vegetation, fragments of vines, leaves, stalks, tumbleweeds. Erroi had edited them down until only a slender element or two remained. One weed rolling alone, two wisteria vines reaching toward each other. He printed these on transparent media and mounted them on sheets of clear acrylic, perhaps an inch thick. The resulting slabs rested upright on wooden bases, ethereal trophies for a fragmentary game.

By applying this process Erroi created objects that were pure in their abstraction, yet more concrete than the originals, more solidly real than photographs typically have any claim to be.

Start with the moment that the image was captured by the camera. In addition to a silhouetted trunk curving across the frame, there was background – other trees, grass, vines, a fence, shadows, sky, the world in its usual complexity. All of this was there for capturing, for reproducing, for enhancing, for displaying. Erroi chose to focus in, to remove everything that could be removed, until one compositional element was left. This is a move from scene to object, a slide along the spectrum of abstraction away from image and towards ideal; this is a removal of detail to increase the conceptual power of what’s left.

Next the printing of the image on a transparent medium. Instead of the artificial projected white of the computer screen, and instead of the quiet reflected white of a usual print, the abstracted image was now surrounded by clearness. In other words, by whatever actually happened to be behind it. This is a return to the world. In place of the erased, forgotten, ignored context of the original physical trunk, we now have our own context – the immediate context of the photograph. This is a move from object back to scene, and this is a strengthening of the image, since it has now taken on physical form; but this is also an addition of detail that increases the trunk’s conceptual power, and too a further slide along the spectrum of abstraction towards ideal.

And then the transparent medium, mounted on a thick piece of acrylic, itself also transparent, held vertically in the air by a small block of wood. The clarified image now took on weight. It had substance. You could hold it as you never could the living tree. The simplified trunk was framed by the clear edge of the plastic – an edge which was barely there. The transparency of the plastic thus both included and excluded the world around it, defining the photograph’s context without imposing upon it. This is a demarcation of limits. Not movement towards ideal or specific, but a chosen stopping point. A captured moment made physical, tangible indefinitely, but precisely delimited in its abstract representational powers. One small piece of the world, examined, truncated, clarified, and given new life, in a new form that captures the essence of the old.