Art review "I LIke it, but What is it?" of Jaromir Stephany cliches-verre by Cheryl Tussing

Does it even really matter? Photographer and art historianJaromir Stephany, in his black and white and color cliché-verre studies , presents us with a highly evocative set of abstract visual images. Like a musical composition, no thought or mediation is needed to take in and savor these pieces.

HERE & NOW

Today's modernity has become a stream of stimuli bombarding our senses. Round-the-clock, real-time late-breaking "newsworthy" events riding split-screen on a narrated video stream--while unrelated text crawls across the bottom of the television "canvas"--has become the norm. Our mind's eye is expected to process and keep pace with the going information rate. What a relief, then, to have a few sensory experiences that continue to operate outside of this paradigm, like our enjoyment of a delicious meal--its flavorful bouquet delighting our palate--or listening to richly orchestrated music passionately performed. This is the way we are engaged by Stephany's cliché-verre imagery.

The abstract, non-objective nature of Mr. Stephany's work allows us freedom from conceptualizing, romanticizing, or analyzing any theme or subject. How can photography--the right hand of documentarians-- release us from our ties to content? Our conditioning tethers photography to notions of a camera and a subject. But in most of his cliché-verre collection at Siegel Gallery, Mr. Stephany uses neither. As a photographer, he is an astute painter.

TIMELY MERGES WITH TIMELESS

The Rorschach-like ambiguity of Mr. Stephany's cliché-verre imagery engages the viewer like a mirror, simply in the moment of "now", where there are no "right answers", where "what you see is what you get"--at least for today. How tomorrow will be experienced promises to be different from that of today or yesterday, yet builds upon both.

Do we ever tire of listening to a single musical composition that's worthy of our attention, or of indulging in our favorite foods? Paradoxically, our enjoyment and appreciation of these experiences tends to grow or deepen with repeated exposure. We become intrigued with new subtleties that previously went unnoticed. We evolve as our capacity to experience grows. It is important that we continue to expose ourselves to experiences that elude the flash-in-the-pan, "been-there, done-that" paradigm, experiences that are further enriched with the passage of time. Really great art bears this hallmark.

Mr. Stephany's artwork is ready for 21st century eyes and contemporary interiors. More accurately, today's audiences and walls are now ready for his work---Mr. Stephany began working on this timely body of photographic work almost 50 years ago and still does not tire of it.

Throughout the past half-century of Stephany's cliché-verre exploration, galleries have had trouble fitting his work into traditional categories of genre, medium or technique, resulting in very little "beyond the ivory tower" audience exposure to such a prolific body of intriguing and timely work.

But within the shifting sands of aesthetic distinctions, today's increasingly accepted "works on paper" category may prove to be a new semantic lifeline extended to this "alternative" (or, really, simply a road less taken!) art form, bringing it rightfully into the light of day for sustained viewing.

CLICHE-VERRE: BRIEF HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Experimenting with materials, imagery and context, post-World War II artists and photographers were producing photograms of objects directly onto light-sensitive paper as they rode the current between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. They also adopted a late 19th-century printmaking process known as cliché-verre, where photographic prints are produced from a unique camera-less negative--an etching upon an emulsion-coated photographic glass plate or film. Camera as perfect machine and replicator of reality now offered a new perspective.

ARTIST ANSWERS THE CALL: WHAT'S OLD IS NEW

It's not clear whether Jaromir Stephany, who had studied with Minor White and was influenced by Henry Holmes-Smith, a student of Moholy-Nagy, happened first upon the cliché-verre as a technique for image-making through his studies in photographic history or as a hands-on, in-the-lab discovery. As a curatorial assistant at the George Eastman House, Stephany was archiving the works of notable photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. When Stephany's photographic studies too closely mimicked the work of other artists he had been cataloging, the young artist, frustrated and wanting to make his own creative mark, would rip and scratch the negatives of his own work. And, he was--here and there--having accidents in the lab. "Chemicals do spill every once in a while," he admits, though not without a chuckle--for this very well may have been the sort of "happy accident" which becomes the impetus for serious artistic inquiry. That inquiry, which took shape as an exploration of cliché-verre image production, has become a lifelong study for Jaromir Stephany. Through it he questions the nature of the universe and our role in it.

PROCESSING THE ARRTIST'S PROCESS

Stephany's dramatic black and white images were created using a "traditional" negative-to-positive darkroom process. Here the artist was "thinking backwards", painting with chemicals directly upon the negative surface which would then undergo the subsequent tone-reversal in the printing of these other-worldly images. While we can see Stephany's subjective hand and eye in the resultant images, we are also witnesses to "snapshot moments" during the interactive performance showcasing the real-world physics of "Substance X" when applied to "Substrate Y". For posterity, so that our eyes might see, he has stopped in time a process of swirling chemical evolution. The photographic artist saw that it was good.

Production of Mr. Stephany's colored clichés-verre, vivid and luscious, required a different technical approach. Achieving the subtle gradations of hue and vibrancy with a negative reversal process that required complex layering and fixing of chemicals became difficult for Stephany to visualize and manage. The artist's solution here was to have the manipulated film surface actually BE the work. The photographer has produced a transparency; the painter has painted upon it.

A GENRE WITHOUT A HOME

This blurring of traditional demarcations between artistic processes was the subject of "Cliché-Verre: Hand-Drawn, Light-Printed," a major exhibition of cameraless imagery organized in 1979 by The Detroit Institute of Fine Arts and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts which included Stephany's clichés-verre and those of other important artists working in this genre-between-genres. Assumptions about photography's formal boundaries were being re-examined: An artist's hand, rather than a camera, was altering the surface of a photographic negative, and light was performing the print-making, serving to render the artist's image visible. Light, optics and color science in digital scanning and printing provide the latest interpretations of Stephany's color cliché-verre work. On a spectrum of artistic process, where does the painting end and the photograph begin?

PARADOX: WHAT'S REAL IS WHAT'S ABSTRACT

Although photographic materials are used to produce clichés-verre, there are no optical systems that sample, re-scale, or re-represent some three-dimensional subject "out there" onto a tiny, two-dimensional rectangular film frame.

And although digital scanning techniques are now used to visually capture the fragile cliche-verre original, this is not "digital art". The colors that we see in Mr. Stephany's prints never originated in RGB phosphors or 256-bit permutations; the colors are those of real-world textured surfaces of applied substance and chemistry, as real as the more familiar pigments of oil paints, acrylics and watercolor.

In the world of cliché-verre, what you see is what was actually there, sitting atop the negative film, a very tiny "painting" made by the artist--with light held up to it so that it might be seen. That swirling universe of mixed-media-in-miniature of the cliché-verre canvas is but a diminutive piece of film, ranging in size from 21/2" x 3" to a whopping 8" x 10".

It is here that optical devices work to extend the natural capabilities of the human eye, allowing us an enlarged view of such a small piece. Photography as classic as Ansel Adams' has always afforded us this visual magic--from depth-of-field impossibilities where foreground and distant background are simultaneously in focus, or shutter-stopping feats that freeze hummingbird wings or obliterate entire moving objects that passed the camera's lens. The application of contemporary digital imaging processes to cliché-verre production has yielded exciting results.

LACK OF REPRESENTATION: THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE

Jaromir Stephany elevates the role of his materials--where the medium is the message. His subject and portrayal are one. His resultant compositions are more a series of intricate tell-tale marks generated by physical materials and their behaviors when coaxed by the artist, than they are an artist's evidencing sovereignty over otherwise-mute materials to which he alone gives voice.

The best photographers tread lightly, like unnoticed voyeurs. And they somehow bring out the best in their subjects--or at least portray such an illusion.

Mr. Stephany's product is a true collaboration between the artist and his materials. Like a set designer, Stephany constructs his reality, creates his universe. Like a choreographer, he chooses his performance elements carefully, determining their placement and timing, and then allows them to "do their thing". As a director, Mr. Stephany guides the improvisational energies of an "ensemble cast"--a cast of physical substances. And then, as photographer to the world that he has just created, he sees that it is good--stopping it and cropping it.

As viewers, we are able to effortlessly enter these self-contained universes constructed and documented by Mr. Stephany. There is no impediment of real-world referent in his abstractions. We are free to let it appeal to our imagination, to let it move us emotionally, to speak to our primitive pre-verbal self . We may be thrown to a remembrance, a resemblance--of something perhaps aquatic, or perhaps mineral, parched and dry--a place of legend and fairy tale, or cosmic ether and dust glowing through a telescope.

The materials and patterns of the cliché-verre are, after all, the stuff of which the rest of life is made and played. Perhaps at some level we recognize this. What we see "out there", in the rich nature of Mr. Stephany's cliché-verre work and elsewhere, may be an uncanny reflection of our own inner nature.

	Review by C. Tussing "I LIKE IT, BUT WHAT IS IT?"
	Does it even really matter? Photographer and art historianJaromir Stephany, in his black and white and color cliché-verre studies , presents us with a highly evocative set of abstract visual images. Like a musical composition, no thought or mediation is needed to take in and savor these pieces. HERE & NOW Today's modernity has become a stream of stimuli bombarding our senses. Round-the-clock, real-time late-breaking "newsworthy" events riding split-screen on a narrated video stream--while unrelated text crawls across the bottom of the television "canvas"--has become the norm. Our mind's eye is expected to process and keep pace with the going information rate. What a relief, then, to have a few sensory experiences that continue to operate outside of this paradigm, like our enjoyment of a delicious meal--its flavorful bouquet delighting our palate--or listening to richly orchestrated music passionately performed. This is the way we are engaged by Stephany's cliché-verre imagery. The abstract, non-objective nature of Mr. Stephany's work allows us freedom from conceptualizing, romanticizing, or analyzing any theme or subject. How can photography--the right hand of documentarians-- release us from our ties to content? Our conditioning tethers photography to notions of a camera and a subject. But in most of his cliché-verre collection at Siegel Gallery, Mr. Stephany uses neither. As a photographer, he is an astute painter. TIMELY MERGES WITH TIMELESS The Rorschach-like ambiguity of Mr. Stephany's cliché-verre imagery engages the viewer like a mirror, simply in the moment of "now", where there are no "right answers", where "what you see is what you get"--at least for today. How tomorrow will be experienced promises to be different from that of today or yesterday, yet builds upon both. Do we ever tire of listening to a single musical composition that's worthy of our attention, or of indulging in our favorite foods? Paradoxically, our enjoyment and appreciation of these experiences tends to grow or deepen with repeated exposure. We become intrigued with new subtleties that previously went unnoticed. We evolve as our capacity to experience grows. It is important that we continue to expose ourselves to experiences that elude the flash-in-the-pan, "been-there, done-that" paradigm, experiences that are further enriched with the passage of time. Really great art bears this hallmark. Mr. Stephany's artwork is ready for 21st century eyes and contemporary interiors. More accurately, today's audiences and walls are now ready for his work---Mr. Stephany began working on this timely body of photographic work almost 50 years ago and still does not tire of it. Throughout the past half-century of Stephany's cliché-verre exploration, galleries have had trouble fitting his work into traditional categories of genre, medium or technique, resulting in very little "beyond the ivory tower" audience exposure to such a prolific body of intriguing and timely work. But within the shifting sands of aesthetic distinctions, today's increasingly accepted "works on paper" category may prove to be a new semantic lifeline extended to this "alternative" (or, really, simply a road less taken!) art form, bringing it rightfully into the light of day for sustained viewing. CLICHE-VERRE: BRIEF HISTORICAL CONTEXT Experimenting with materials, imagery and context, post-World War II artists and photographers were producing photograms of objects directly onto light-sensitive paper as they rode the current between Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism. They also adopted a late 19th-century printmaking process known as cliché-verre, where photographic prints are produced from a unique camera-less negative--an etching upon an emulsion-coated photographic glass plate or film. Camera as perfect machine and replicator of reality now offered a new perspective. ARTIST ANSWERS THE CALL: WHAT'S OLD IS NEW It's not clear whether Jaromir Stephany, who had studied with Minor White and was influenced by Henry Holmes-Smith, a student of Moholy-Nagy, happened first upon the cliché-verre as a technique for image-making through his studies in photographic history or as a hands-on, in-the-lab discovery. As a curatorial assistant at the George Eastman House, Stephany was archiving the works of notable photographers such as Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. When Stephany's photographic studies too closely mimicked the work of other artists he had been cataloging, the young artist, frustrated and wanting to make his own creative mark, would rip and scratch the negatives of his own work. And, he was--here and there--having accidents in the lab. "Chemicals do spill every once in a while," he admits, though not without a chuckle--for this very well may have been the sort of "happy accident" which becomes the impetus for serious artistic inquiry. That inquiry, which took shape as an exploration of cliché-verre image production, has become a lifelong study for Jaromir Stephany. Through it he questions the nature of the universe and our role in it. PROCESSING THE ARRTIST'S PROCESS Stephany's dramatic black and white images were created using a "traditional" negative-to-positive darkroom process. Here the artist was "thinking backwards", painting with chemicals directly upon the negative surface which would then undergo the subsequent tone-reversal in the printing of these other-worldly images. While we can see Stephany's subjective hand and eye in the resultant images, we are also witnesses to "snapshot moments" during the interactive performance showcasing the real-world physics of "Substance X" when applied to "Substrate Y". For posterity, so that our eyes might see, he has stopped in time a process of swirling chemical evolution. The photographic artist saw that it was good. Production of Mr. Stephany's colored clichés-verre, vivid and luscious, required a different technical approach. Achieving the subtle gradations of hue and vibrancy with a negative reversal process that required complex layering and fixing of chemicals became difficult for Stephany to visualize and manage. The artist's solution here was to have the manipulated film surface actually BE the work. The photographer has produced a transparency; the painter has painted upon it. A GENRE WITHOUT A HOME This blurring of traditional demarcations between artistic processes was the subject of "Cliché-Verre: Hand-Drawn, Light-Printed," a major exhibition of cameraless imagery organized in 1979 by The Detroit Institute of Fine Arts and Houston's Museum of Fine Arts which included Stephany's clichés-verre and those of other important artists working in this genre-between-genres. Assumptions about photography's formal boundaries were being re-examined: An artist's hand, rather than a camera, was altering the surface of a photographic negative, and light was performing the print-making, serving to render the artist's image visible. Light, optics and color science in digital scanning and printing provide the latest interpretations of Stephany's color cliché-verre work. On a spectrum of artistic process, where does the painting end and the photograph begin? PARADOX: WHAT'S REAL IS WHAT'S ABSTRACT Although photographic materials are used to produce clichés-verre, there are no optical systems that sample, re-scale, or re-represent some three-dimensional subject "out there" onto a tiny, two-dimensional rectangular film frame. And although digital scanning techniques are now used to visually capture the fragile cliche-verre original, this is not "digital art". The colors that we see in Mr. Stephany's prints never originated in RGB phosphors or 256-bit permutations; the colors are those of real-world textured surfaces of applied substance and chemistry, as real as the more familiar pigments of oil paints, acrylics and watercolor. In the world of cliché-verre, what you see is what was actually there, sitting atop the negative film, a very tiny "painting" made by the artist--with light held up to it so that it might be seen. That swirling universe of mixed-media-in-miniature of the cliché-verre canvas is but a diminutive piece of film, ranging in size from 21/2" x 3" to a whopping 8" x 10". It is here that optical devices work to extend the natural capabilities of the human eye, allowing us an enlarged view of such a small piece. Photography as classic as Ansel Adams' has always afforded us this visual magic--from depth-of-field impossibilities where foreground and distant background are simultaneously in focus, or shutter-stopping feats that freeze hummingbird wings or obliterate entire moving objects that passed the camera's lens. The application of contemporary digital imaging processes to cliché-verre production has yielded exciting results. LACK OF REPRESENTATION: THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE Jaromir Stephany elevates the role of his materials--where the medium is the message. His subject and portrayal are one. His resultant compositions are more a series of intricate tell-tale marks generated by physical materials and their behaviors when coaxed by the artist, than they are an artist's evidencing sovereignty over otherwise-mute materials to which he alone gives voice. The best photographers tread lightly, like unnoticed voyeurs. And they somehow bring out the best in their subjects--or at least portray such an illusion. Mr. Stephany's product is a true collaboration between the artist and his materials. Like a set designer, Stephany constructs his reality, creates his universe. Like a choreographer, he chooses his performance elements carefully, determining their placement and timing, and then allows them to "do their thing". As a director, Mr. Stephany guides the improvisational energies of an "ensemble cast"--a cast of physical substances. And then, as photographer to the world that he has just created, he sees that it is good--stopping it and cropping it. As viewers, we are able to effortlessly enter these self-contained universes constructed and documented by Mr. Stephany. There is no impediment of real-world referent in his abstractions. We are free to let it appeal to our imagination, to let it move us emotionally, to speak to our primitive pre-verbal self . We may be thrown to a remembrance, a resemblance--of something perhaps aquatic, or perhaps mineral, parched and dry--a place of legend and fairy tale, or cosmic ether and dust glowing through a telescope. The materials and patterns of the cliché-verre are, after all, the stuff of which the rest of life is made and played. Perhaps at some level we recognize this. What we see "out there", in the rich nature of Mr. Stephany's cliché-verre work and elsewhere, may be an uncanny reflection of our own inner nature.
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