Georges Rousse at Robert Mann - New York

This French artist's first solo exhibition in the United States included two photographs from 1997 of interiors transformed by geometric forms and eight works from 2000-01 suggesting more cryptic interests. The latter, measuring approximately 5 by 4 or 4 by 5 feet, depict white rooms manipulated by Rousse so that topographical maps, or abstract skeins of colored lines, appear to lie on the foreground plane of the images.

Rousse projects and paints these designs onto the rooms' multiple surfaces, then photographs them from the precise position where the illusionistic images cohere. Moving aside even one millimeter would disrupt the orthogonal program. He usually finds condemned spaces to shoot; the titles refer to their geographic locations (Cologne, Turin, Berlin, Fujiyama). However, the overlaid maps are of sites that the artist has visited in a different capacity, on hikes in Nepal and the Far East.

Rousse's architectonic interventions combine Euclidean geometry with Robert Smithson's challenge to gallery esthetics. It is important to view them as beautifully printed photographs. But it is equally essential to see them as conceptual pieces, joining practice and theory. Smithson's "Site/Non-Site" photographic works and "Mirror Displacements" (where the actual works were located outside the gallery and not visible to viewers) come to mind, but Rousse elides the tension between gallery and subject--the artist's interventions are removed after they are documented. They exist only in these prints.

Clermont-Ferrand depicts an interior located somewhere in the capital of Auvergne and features a map of Tsho Rolpa, a glacial lake in the Rolwaling area of Nepal. The map, which is black with white markings, hovers magically in space as a transparent plane. Junctions are carefully calculated in this work where the left and right edges of the map join the vertical supports of flanking archways. Here, and in other pieces, topographically erratic lineations of the maps clash with the simple vaulted or perpendicular surfaces of the architecture. Many of the rooms include windows that provide a poetic ambient light, perhaps as a reference to the outside world represented by the maps.

It is Ironic that Rousse painstakingly crafts works that in their multilayered illusions initially appear digitally modified. Is he playing with today's expectations of contemporary photography? Rousse's complex method is often visually confusing, but elegant examples like Clermont-Ferrand

draw the viewer in. This particular work employs perspective and a classical sense of symmetry to effectively convey the power of the artist's ideas.

Defying categorization, the best of Rousse's works imprint maps of wild terrain on degraded spaces of human interaction. They are records of mapping, entropy and time, as well as an artistic process elucidated with considerable visual style.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group