Rena Bransten Gallery, SF is showing recent photos by Matthias Hoch. They are beautiful and cold.
An essay by curator Aimée Reed points out a tension in his pictures—a tension between an ideal and a lack—a lack of humanity.
Hoch's new photographs (and video) concern Almere. Almere is a designed town in the Netherlands, a model modern village established in the late 70s with the express mission of providing housing and employment relief for Amsterdam under a plan that emphasized ethical design with a stress on functionality and equality. The end result of such factors is that the streets are easy to clean and the buildings look much like the architects designed them, even twenty years later.
What I noted in my first look at the work is the beautiful composition of his images. These are documents of buildings and interiors but not as straight documentary for they are highly composed shots that focus on pattern and often create an agreeable abstract display. The photos place a stress on design over content.
This, for instance, is a children's playground with faux rock and turf.
In the very act of composition, Hoch manages to echo the subject he is focused on. There is nothing overtly disagreeable about his images—the buildings are portrayed as beautiful or fanciful as they are. The cold light is the cold light of day. There is no movement here—no life, but there is design, and color, and it is pleasing.
This image, Almere #7 recalls the videos he also made of Almere. The first is a series of drive-by shots of these cool, clean-lined buildings. The smooth tracking and even light on mid-range shots of orange doors, lime green trash containers, then copper siding and windows, extends his aesthetic into a longer view. The experience is of stillness and finish—an exploration of buildings at their best, early morning perhaps, when no one is around. Who hasn't taken travel photos of piazzas just after dawn, before crowds, to get the best of the place?
I use that word on purpose. For the building is a container of place; liveliness makes a place a Place (to go to, be in, to be seen). Evidently the piazzas, town squares of this newly built city center are mostly empty. New shops, new bars, the cinema even, all in cool new buildings, don't have the draw that the old city streets of Amsterdam which is where the locals go. Almere is a model town, which is to say modeled on a real town, but it hasn't found it's center yet. People who live and work here, they go out of town.
This image from 2002 could be quite depressing had it been framed differently. But that is Hoch's approach: to present the thing, however banal or troublesome (such as faux grass in a children's park) in such a way as to be compositionally beautiful.
Or arresting, as is this simple shot of blue wall and gray floor.
This show reminded me of one I'd seen this summer in Santa Monica, Lewis Baltz: Sites of Technology at Gallery Luisotti.
Lewis Baltz, after working many years in black and white turned to color. Known for incredible work of the desert landscape, in the late 80s, he explored the strange landscape of institutes of high technology.
This is Cray Supercomputer, CERN, Geneva...
and this Unoccupied Office, Mitsubishi, Vitre (FR), both from 1989-91.
Baltz is working with a very different aesthetic intent than Hoch, though in a sense they are both concerned with the same subject, the human/inhuman environment. In Geneva, for instance, instead of pulling in close to the supercomputer, taking a shot of the blue and yellow, at the corner for instance, Blatz steps back from the scene and allows in the consoles to the side, the empty chair and blank walls. There's no mistaking the strange inhumanity of the place, nor the vacuousness of the unoccupied office space.
It is a painful place, this empty space which is a place people occupy, daily. Baltz's photos convey pathos and this emotional content is what is missing in Hoch's work—yet his are beautiful. It's an interesting dilemma. I am delighted by beauty and moved by feeling. Not either, but both. Cakes and Ale.
Hoch's photos courtesy of Galerie Akinci, Amsterdam and Dogenhaus Galerie, Leipzig.
