Always the
Photograph astonishes me, with an astonishment which endures and renews
itself, inexhaustibly. Perhaps this astonishment, this persistence reaches down
into the religious substance out of which I am molded....Photography has
something to do with resurrection....
-Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida
Stefan Stux
Gallery is pleased to present "Decompose/Recompose: Resurrect," the first
one-person exhibition in New York of recent photo works by Alex Guofeng Cao.
Confronting the
viewer with a large-scale, imposing photographic image, one that is on the face
of it, very familiar-a well-known celebrity photo-Alex Guofeng Cao connects the
circuits of historical meaning by breaking down this memorable face into a grid
of thousands of copies of a smaller, related image. Marilyn Monroe decomposes
into strings of repeated pictures of JFK, or of the Mona Lisa; Pamela Anderson
dissolves into tiny reproductions of Courbet's L'Origine du Monde; Andy Warhol
emerges from a sea of Mao's.
These finely
produced photographic mosaics, inspired by Cao's interest in similarly pieced
works from Greek and Roman antiquity, leverage the new technical possibilities
of digital images, making the pixel itself a new, self-conscious carrier of
meaning itself, and not merely a structural support for its expression. Cao
takes this a step farther, replacing some of the thousands of embedded images
in each work with other pictures (requiring closer investigation in order to
find them), casting deeper reflection on the historical or cultural field of
meaning already generated by the two primary interwoven images. In JFK vs.
Marilyn, for example, the 'pixels' numbered 1962 and 1963 have been
replaced by an image of a candle and of a rifle. The artist renders what
Barthes formulated as the photograph's intransigent presence as what-has-been porous to the
narratives of history and the process of representation itself. The process of
decomposing the original image allows it to re-emerge with a new lease on life;
to be resurrected, as it were.
Alex Guofeng
Cao was born in China, and currently lives and works in New York.
