Florian Maier-Aichen

It is easy to get distracted by Florian Maier-Aichen’s technical wizardry. After all, making it snow on a row of faux-Tudor cottages arrayed along Los Angeles’s La Brea Avenue without the aid of an army of snow machines, as Maier-Aichen has done in his current exhibition’s opening photograph, La Brea Avenue in the Snow (all works 2011), is no mean feat, even in the age of Photoshop. Similarly, one can get lost in the satisfying bombast of his epically scaled sublime vistas, which call to mind, in turn or occasionally simultaneously, the landscape paintings of nineteenth-century Romantic artists (Caspar David Friedrich, Thomas Cole, early J. M. W. Turner) and the achingly precise techno-vision of Andreas Gursky. However, Maier-Aichen’s new works seem to be designed to remind us that these aspects of his practice, though they are prominent and no doubt integral, are merely handmaidens of his broader conceptual concerns.

Pictures here that seem to radically diverge from his previous output, such as Der Spaziergang (Green, White and Blue) (The Walk [Green, White and Blue]), in which a Kenneth Noland–esque target seems to have crash-landed on a lunar landscape rendered by Chuck Jones, and Untitled, a colorful modernist swirl that recalls a Lorenz attractor, are a case in point in this regard. Produced using the techniques of cel animation, which involve layering painted transparencies onto a fixed, opaque background and photographing them on a copy stand, they reveal themselves to be whip-smart investigations of the specific qualities of photography’s digitization. Like cel animation, Photoshop constructions like Maier-Aichen’s aforementioned LA snowscape are produced using layers placed on top of a photographic ground. The space of these immaterial layers, Maier-Aichen appears to argue, is one where photography can reengage with its old bogeyman—painting—in a productive rather than a simply imitative fashion.