Adam Fuss Details of Love
Since moving to New York in the early ‘80’s, the London-born photographer Adam Fuss has attracted considerable attention with inventive works that offer intriguing sensations of color and light. His reputation is based primarily on the way he tries to stretch the medium to capture effects not otherwise experienced.
For the last decade, Adam Fuss has concentrated on possibilities involving the photogram.
Animate or inanimate objects are placed on photosensitive paper and then exposed to light, and almost everything it records tends to dematerialize. In his adaptions of this approach, first formulated by William Henry Fox Talbot in the 1830’s, Adam Fuss manipulates colours , subjects and surroundings and aims for a visceral impact that will merge issues of perception with intellectual considerations.
Adam Fuss started the series “Details of Love” about 7 years ago. The work that was the prototype for this project is a color photogram, depicting two rabbits in profile, face to face, surrounded by a luminous multicolored tangle of abstract squiggles. It is called, simply, Love. The squiggles that are the basis of all the images in this series are rabbit intestines; the painterly depth and range of colors are the result of an unlikely chemical interaction between the fresh innards and Cibachrome paper.
Describing “Love”, Adam Fuss alludes alternately to its emotional underpinnings and to his intellectualized artistic reaction : “There’s a quality of line that’s figurative, and a quality of line that’s abstract, and I wanted to make a picture where these two worlds were joined, in an intimate way…
It came initially from this tension between inside and out, and the place where these things converge.”
The images also exude a peculiar tenderness, which lies in the care with which the animals have been placed. The artist arranged his actors on the paper, each with paws reaching toward the partner opposite, in gestures not of successful union but of eternal yearning. The emotion of the pictures also lies in the appropriateness of the chemical transformations in reinforcing the impact of fatal, enduring connection.
Following Fuss, “the rabbit was the perfect animal, because it’s a creature that absorbs a tremendous amount of symbolism – reproduction, fertility, sacrifice, innocence”.
The work of Adam Fuss has been shown at numerous solo- and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. “Details of Love” will be his first project in Belgium. On 19 November 1999, a retrospective exhibition of his work is opening at the Winterthur Fotomuseum. This exhibition is accompanied by an extensive catalogue and will be travelling through Europe.
In December 1999, a new and very personal monography of his most recent work, entitled “Ghost” will appear at “Twin Palm Publishers” in Santa Fe.
P. BRATT, Experiments in Color and Light, in the New York Times, 26 July 1998
M. SAND, Adam Fuss, in Aperture, Fall 1993, p. 44-53.
E. PARRY, Adam Fuss, Arena Editions, Santa Fe, 1997.
