Cynthia Greig

by Emiliano D’Angelo

Photography left its “age of innocence” relatively rapidly and recently; in the last few decades the modernist approach based on authorship which it had received as heritage (and burden) from the art system within which it had flourished has gradually been undermined by an aggressive avant-garde of new operators who have, on the basis of a much more solid conscious theory than that of their predecessors, challenged the very ontological status of taking photographs, introducing the issues of the conflict between perception and experience, the enigmatic fluctuation between reality and appearance, and the more or less deceptive nature of the reproduced images.
Cynthia Greig is a very coherent and convinced representative of this approach, conventionally defined as “postmodern”, of contemporary photography; she has often brandished especially against the past the weapons of irony, of quotation and of lucid detachment, all of which have been part of the familiar vocabulary of postmodernism since its early stages (both in a figurative context and in a literary one).
But what I would like to highlight in her modus operandi is the fact that she combines this with a care for the physical and material components of the image that resembles that of the craftsman, preferring demanding, old techniques as chromogenic black and white emulsions or prints with “archive pigments” to the immediate perception and monotony of digital images, in order to create almost painterly effects that are not infrequently unsettling to the observer.
In the “Nature morte” series the source of inspiration is a sentence from the notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci: “The line as such has neither material nor substance, it can be considered not so much a real object as an imaginary idea”. The product is, therefore, a reflection on the pliancy of the visual experience and the fleetingness of the limits of perception. A reflection taken to the extreme limits through a process of phenomenological reduction of the represented reality (teapots and arranged vanitas, fruits and flower vases, bottles whose severity evokes Morandi) to their essential and indispensable components, beyond which they would dissolve in the white background surrounding the essential agglomerates of lines they are formed of.
The intention is probably to carry Magritte’s provocation, consisting of revealing the purely convention nature of artistic representation, to even greater extremes. What the American artist seems to be telling us is that “this is not a teapot”; “this is not a bottle”; “this is not a mirror”. Statements that become all the more unsettling when they refer to photographed, and not painted, images. Roland Barthes assumed, as basis for the ontological statue of photography, the principle of indissolubility between referent and signifier, which entails the undeniable reality of the photographed object as compared to the “chimeras” pursued by the painter and sculpture (“dans la photographie, la pipe est toujours une pipe, inexorablement…”). In Cynthia Greig’s last images also Barthes’ dogma seems to begin to hover on the edge of a background of white darkness.