Jasper de Beijer

In the weeks after 9/11, Slavoj Žižek wrote a stunningly clear-eyed analysis of the catastrophe and related global circumstances. The third version of the essay, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real,” opens with a reference to Alain Badiou’s assertion that the nineteenth century designed plans and projects for the future, whereas the twentieth century possessed a passion for the Real itself, rather than an imagined possibility. Jasper de Beijer’s new photographs of handmade models feature idealized images of nineteenth-century invention, yet his process favors image over object, representation over construction. Using little more than paper, tape, glue, and nails, de Beijer builds elaborate scenes, which he lights and photographs in his studio. His newest body of work, “The Riveted Kingdom,” 2007–, includes images of a man in top hat and tails poised in front of a factory, but closer inspection reveals the man’s face to be patched together from bits of torn paper. In another photograph (all are untitled), the colorful pillars of an airy glass-enclosed pavilion are formed where the edge of one roughly cut sheet of paper meets another. Like an illusionist revealing the tricks of his trade, de Beijer shows us the crevices and imperfect seams of his simple constructions, vacillating between nostalgia for the past and a celebration, or exploitation, of our dependence on representation. Žižek’s essay elaborates on the political and social implications of denying, or shielding oneself from, the Real. Seven years later, de Beijer’s work beautifully captures the disorientation of this kind of isolated dreaming, as well as the tragic joissance of acquiescing to an image as reality.

Part of this exhibition remains on view at fette’s gallery until July 14.