Yannick Demmerle
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Demmerle, who’s 33, was born and raised in a small French town near the German border; seven of his eight photographs at Vedanta–his first one-person show in the United States–were taken in northern German forests. Quiet and contemplative, they seem to address not the viewer as a member of a group, the way Gursky’s and Struth’s do, but the individual viewer–as do the paintings of 19th-century German romantic Caspar David Friedrich, one of Demmerle’s influences. Both artists lead the viewer into a private journey of discovery.
One of the forest pictures (all of which are untitled) shows trees growing close together, some rising straight up and some leaning to the left–an apparently organized mixture of verticals and diagonals softened by the out-of-focus but still tactile leaves in the foreground. Beyond the trunks, in the background, another maze of soft greens draws the viewer’s attention. This sensual, meditative image invites the eye to wander and contemplate. I thought of German nature artist Wolfgang Laib, who makes simple, subtle, elegant sculptures of marble and milk or beeswax and wood.
Three untitled images in a group show mounted by Demmerle’s Berlin gallery in a rented space downstairs from Vedanta are from a different body of work: taken in two Berlin zoos, these photographs emphasize the geometry of empty cages. Each is shot head-on, so that the cage’s grid confronts the eye as a barrier, echoed by the grids of tiles on the rear walls and by other rectangular forms: doors, windows, vents. One cage contains a tree for an animal to climb; another holds a log and some rope. The obvious contrast between the imprisoning grids and these few, spare organic forms heightens our sense of the two pictures’ difference from Demmerle’s nature photographs, perhaps showing a nature lover’s hatred of zoos. But the way the grids echo the photo’s rectangle also calls attention to the photographic process, just as Struth’s and Gursky’s works do. There’s a crucial difference, however: Demmerle’s pictures don’t celebrate the structure inherent in zoos and photography but see that artificiality as a potential trap.
