Johannes Karhs at Almine Rech - Paris

Johannes Karhs is a young Berlin-based artist who forages among film stills and documentary photographs, making paintings and charcoal drawings after the images he finds. It's hardly a new idea, but as his recent "Drunken Boat" exhibition revealed, Karhs can unmoor his sources in a way that provocatively blurs fact and fiction. In some of these works (all 2001-02), he infuses cinematic kitsch with realism and, in others, historical "truth" with other-worldly fantasy.

Girl `n Gun is a painting of the first kind. Its heightened detail and emphatically intimate scale would seem to ensure readability, yet the demonic expression of the film actress with a gun pressed to her temple remains inscrutable. Is she the victim of violence or tempting her prey with the promise of it? At first glance, the work reads like a detail from an old hand-painted movie poster, but on closer inspection, it suggests more recent technologies. The horizontal texture of evenly wiped paint emulates the scan lines of a video screen. It seems as though the artist has cranked up the color control on the TV, too: lurid reds and pinks dissect the face into patterns of crisp electronic shadows which contrast with the angelic halo of blonde fuzz. Despite the extreme artificiality and banality of this Hollywood sex-and-violence equation, Kahrs manages to convey some of the charged momentariness of a real-life encounter.

Conversely, he appropriates historical moments and renders them dreamlike. I Finally Accept Fate is a mural-size field of uniformly black charcoal, punctuated by several meticulously illuminated hands dancing across its surface. Kahrs worked from a news image of a rally or convention, perhaps a politician pressing the flesh. Selective transformation created a collage of strange, ritualized gestures in a faceless crowd.

These image mutations grew most disorienting in a dialogue between two charcoal drawings, one depicting an anxious black man (Portrait), and the other a white police officer in profile (Detail). Each looked toward the other across the space of the gallery. They remind one of documents used as exhibits in court, blown-up for the scrutiny of every detail. But the soft charcoal edges of the renderings tend to dissolve the facts on display rather than fixing them, revealing frustratingly little about the acts of violence one senses beyond the frame. The perceptual effect is like watching a black-and-white photograph permanently developing in its bath. Even if viewers recognize the people and events represented (the Congolese nationalist leader Patrice Lumumba just before his assassination in 1961, a New York City policeman at a riot in the `60s), the confrontation between the two demands that we construct more open-ended narratives, more personal histories, from these floating fragments.

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