JAMES WELLING

On the ground floor of the gallery, Welling’s new photographs, made in the spring of 2024 during a month-long residency at the American Academy in Rome, encompass a myriad of themes. The images deliberately elude classification or typology and recall his Light Sourcesseries (1992-2001) where Welling explored several subjects. Detailed or partial views of recognizable buildings, such as the MAXXI Museum_,_ the Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone, Rome, or the arcades of the Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan, accentuate uncommon attributes within the architecture. The mathematical order of the tessellated paving stones in the Piazza Navona, or the Fibonacci spirals found in photographs of artichoke and zucchini flowers provide a visual analogue to the underlying mathematical basis of digital photography, or photo numérique, numerical photographs.

As Welling explains: “To my mind, Thought Objects are images whose meanings detach from the photograph’s nominal subject to suggest multiple readings.” The massive wooden door of Michelangelo’s studio for example, can alternate from being either an ordinary entryway or a pulsating network of colorful afterimages hovering at the doors of perception. In Thought Objects Welling uses a digital variation of 70’s “equidensity processing” that had its origin in analog photography. Similar to solarization or posterization, this process consists of combining positive and negative images to change the visual texture and color of the image. Thought Objects are UV prints, an innovative digital printing process that affixes pigment permanently to thin aluminum panels. These panels are hung using an “frame” designed by the artist that creates the effect of the work floating off the wall.

At 66 rue du Temple, three 2023 Thought Objects depict quintessential French architectural elements: the circular staircase in Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, entrance columns of Claude-Nicolas Ledoux’s Saline Royale d’Arc-et-Senans and a half-painted typical Parisian door. For Staircase, Villa Savoye, 2022, Welling photographed a sheet of paper coated with blue and orange ink, and digitally superimposed it over a view of the villa’s spiral staircase. For Royal Salt-Works, Arc-et-Senans__, 2023, Welling further extends the equidensity process to exaggerate the contours of the columns, thereby generating a bas-relief effect reminiscent of the outlines in a Herge’s Tintin cartoon.

A selection of Welling’s earliest digital color transformations can also be found in 66 rue du Temple. The Maison de verre, an architectural landmark built between 1928 and 1931 in the 7th arrondissement of Paris for Doctor Jean Dalsace, is transformed in an interplay between artificial color, metal and glass, where all three elements form a creative dialogue. Welling over saturated certain areas of the fifteen photographs in the series and altered light and shadow in others. These interventions create a visual experience in which the architecture is both subject and material for transformation.