INTANGIBLE LANDSCAPES Curadoria Isa Dreyer Botelho Gundi Falk is an image maker with a unique ability to construct visual experiments.The images on display are the result of a complex game of controlled and uncontrollable chance, impossible to realise by any other means. They hover between form and formlessness. By questioning the very essence of the photographic process, she subverts the imaging process by depicting the chemical and physical events in a partially calculated way, rendering images not developing them. These camera-less photographic images are the result of exposing photographic paper to the same chemicals usually employed to develop and fix images, but in unconventional ways. Working in many ways more like a painter than a photographer, she replaces the canvas with photographic paper and attempts to let representations emerge out of the abstract materiality of the chemicals as she manipulates them. She interprets and responds as the image progresses in front of her, incorporating what August Strindberg called, and later the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionists, ‘chance in artistic creation’. The chemigram, invented in 1956 by Belgian artist Pierre Cordier with whom Falk has been collaborating and widely exhibiting since 2011, remains an opaque process. Although commonly described as a camera-less medium, it cannot be classed as a photograph or a photogram, for it does not rely solely on light or negatives to produce an image. As in the case of the photogram, the result is unique. The first camera-less techniques were explored at the dawn of photography in the 1830s, were again relevant during the 1920s, and have been rediscovered by contemporary artists in the midst of the digital age. Various reasons seem to be responsible for the revival in recent years of an increasing interest in camera-less photography. The main reasons among them are the rapid expansion of networked digital technologies and their impact on traditional forms of photography which, in turn, have triggered a nostalgia for the alchemical appeal of alternative chemistry-based processes now being liberated from their descriptive functions and reborn in radically new ways. The present show inaugurates a new phase in the artist’s career since it is her first solo exhibition featuring a collection of innovative chemigrams, all of which are unique and thus non-editioned. The work presented in this exhibition, together with a distinct body of work that occupies a territory between drawing, painting and sculpture, currently on view at Museu Nogueira da Silva, in Braga (3.6.- 29.6.16), offer insight into the artists’s evolving creative formats.
