The Family of Man by Elisheva Biernoff

Since French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced what is now the world’s oldest photograph in the mid-1820s – a solitary, ghostly image of a roof taken from a window – the medium has inspired an abundance of beauty and melancholy. . As a child, I looked at photos – family photos – stored in folders, in plastic sleeves. Some of the images filled me with a sense of loss, of times gone by in a world I would never know. If I didn’t recognize the figures in these photos, I would ask my mother, or another elder, to identify them. But I didn’t stop there. Once I had a name, I would write it on the back of the photograph or type a label and carefully place it near the photograph. I couldn’t bear for someone to be forgotten.

Memory, the desire to capture one’s true self, the desire to be seen, and questions of identity infuse Elisheva Biernoff’s fantastically moving and unusual paintings. Working from found photographs – snapshots – Biernoff creates works that correspond, in size, scale and color, to what she sees in the original images. (She even reproduces the dates on the photographs and the texture of the photo paper, and on the back of the canvas, it reproduces everything that is on the back of the print.) Still, despite her diligence and incredible eye for detail—or perhaps because of it – his paintings are a memory of the source material, the original repurposed by a different mind, a different idea of ​​art and attention.

“Fragment”, 2024.

I first saw Biernoff’s work on a trip to San Francisco in 2017. A painting was on display at the Fraenkel Gallery and drew me in with its moving beauty and aura of sadness. Titled “Vision” (2016), the piece measures five and one-eighth by three inches and shows a black woman leaning on a waist-high tree root, the tree fallen only partially into the frame, the forest beyond. The woman’s white blouse with a high collar and puffy shoulders evokes 19th century clothing – something out of the Wild West – as does her denim skirt. We see her in three-quarter profile, looking to the right, soft black hair framing her angelic brown face, which is highlighted by a touch of celestial light. When I first saw the work, I thought it was a photograph. Most of the artists exhibited at Fraenkel are photographers (Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand and the like). Looking closer, Biernoff’s image didn’t exactly look like a photograph; it was less clear. But it didn’t look like a painting. Watching “Vision,” I couldn’t help but remember the mysterious plastic photographs I tried to identify a long time ago, while yearning for everyone in the world to be remembered.

Biernoff is also drawn to the mystery. Her subjects are people and scenes she is drawn to, I believe, because of what they suggest beyond the frame – narratives that remain out of sight. We could say that the process of remaking an image as a painting is a way for Biernoff to get to know unknown landscapes and their subjects, which are strange to him – and thus deepen the mystery through alchemy. Looking at a Biernoff piece, we are caught between known and unknown worlds.

Born in Albuquerque in 1980, Biernoff graduated from Yale in 2002 and received her master’s degree from California College of the Arts seven years later. In 2009, she was invited to create an installation for a storefront in the Bayview-Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. (She’s lived in the city since 2007.) She didn’t know anyone in that neighborhood, so to familiarize herself with the area and its residents, she asked people if they had any photos of family members they wanted to share. with her. She made her first photographic paintings from these images, and when she was finished, she placed the paintings in the store window — to “create a community wall in the living room,” she said.

Biernoff’s current exhibition, “Smashed Up House After the Storm,” at Fraenkel, is also about community, but the works here don’t suggest togetherness. Instead, the artist focused on images that speak of a kind of isolation and the precariousness of home itself. Among the major works, in an exhibition full of them, is “Strike” (2021), in which a fairly standard white clapboard two-story house is seen at an angle with a dead tree stump next to it. The stump, jagged, with sharp bands of tree and bark extending upward, is just one of the painting’s disjunctive elements. Another is a translucent yellow band that runs from top to bottom on the right side of the work, as if eroding the image. Result of overexposure? Too much time on the developing tray?

Works like “After Dark” (2024) are no more dramatic than the world momentarily stopped in “Strike”; the drama is just more explicit. In “After Dark,” a man stands near a tree — a favorite Biernoff theme. Wearing a light shirt, jeans and sunglasses, he is looking at the photographer while looking at the ground, where something is burning. He has fun, but with what? The photographer? Your gesture? The fire? The only constant “story” in Biernoff’s photos is the surreal nature of the photograph itself. (In this, she reminds me of another San Francisco-based artist, the late painter Robert Bechtle, whose haunting Southern California scenes often focus on life’s “nothing” moments: a car parked on a sunny but eerily empty street; members of a family looking at the viewer while eating frozen treats.)

“After Dark”, 2024.

In “Smashed Up House After the Storm,” Biernoff makes more statements about architectural elements than in previous shows. “Fragment” (2024), for example, shows a wall from which two photos have been removed, leaving faded outlines where they once stood, their absence underlined by a postcard posted near the empty rectangles. But I found that I was less interested in its ideas about space than in the way its people live and work in it. Two heartbreakers are “Interlude” (2023) and “Gathering” (2022). In the first, a topless man partially reclining on a single bed – a modern Madame Récamier. Your look is a challenge: Can you see me? What is noticeable, besides the wristwatch, is the way his legs are crossed at the ankle – a “feminine” pose that questions gender roles as much as the makeup he appears to be wearing. “Interlude” made me think of another queer family album film: “A Naked Man Being a Woman, New York” (1968), by Diane Arbus. In that indelible photograph, a man tucks his penis between his legs. He also wears makeup, which contrasts with his dark skin. But Biernoff, unlike Arbus, doesn’t look for living myths to explore; their myths are ready in their found photographs.

The extraordinary “Gathering” (2022) feels like the show’s emotional coda. In it, four figures – three women and a boy – are sitting on a sofa. A woman’s arms are crossed; the boy’s hands are crossed between his legs. But we couldn’t make out anyone’s face, not in detail. The camera’s flash reflects off a large mirror above them, lending an aura – an electric holiness – to figures that seem to float somewhere between the real and the unreal. In this image, Biernoff emphasizes, once again, how little we see, how little we remember, even if we want to. ♦