Elizabeth Leach Gallery is excited to present Peter Gronquist's exhibition Light Record. In this new body of work Gronquist has created a series of elegant, gestural abstractions that seamlessly combine the fundamental compositional protocols of both painting and photography, while simultaneously questioning the categorical imperatives that seem to arbitrarily define and separate the two mediums.
Intrigued by the possibility of capturing and freezing something as ineffable and fugitive as a flicker of light, Gronquist set out to harness the basic elements of the photographic process and situate them within the more expressive, haptic tendencies of painting. The result is a near-perfect fusion of painting's signature autographic "stroke" and the more anonymous, almost mechanic registration associated with the bulk of photographic reproduction and its myriad effects.
Beginning the process in a custom DIY darkroom of his own design, Gronquist used light sensitive photo-paper and a long, narrow LED light-stick as his respective canvas and paint brush. Equal parts conductor's baton and necromantic wand, Gronquist wields the LED light-stick so that it becomes an extension of his own hand/eye/wrist relay-system or even a prosthetic appendage in its own right. Hovering over the blank photo-paper, the light glides across its frictionless surface in a kind of rhythmic, ritualized benediction.
Although there is no camera, no negative, and no actual photography involved, once Gronquist subjects the photo-paper to his own chemical process, vaporous images begin to materialize and take shape. Instantly calling to mind unfurling manuscripts, swirling musical notations, Renaissance curtains and drapery, or the doppler traces of action in Étienne-Jules Marey's early motion studies achieved with his “chronophotographic gun.” As these shadowy, wraith-like forms double back and fold into each other, Gronquist is able to finesse and pull our eyes into a deep illusionistic space without the aid of receding horizon lines or any of the dimensional tropes commonly associated with Classical painting.
