detail
the long view
the day unfolds
The erotic frisson of much of the work in his earlier walls is missing in the installation Joe Ovelman completed early this morning. Ovelman has been spending a lot of time in São Paulo and it seems to agree with him.
The photography is almost painfully beautiful, but his work is always beautiful and very often there's some pain too. These photographs are also, well, very happy, but they are not dull. There is nothing casual about their composition and they are clearly the work of a master. They are also intensely personal and they reveal a private world which is, while not quite exotic, warmly exceptional and pretty inaccessible even to those who may be privileged to travel a lot.
It's very interesting to me that many of the images are of walls, but these walls seem to shelter more than they exclude. Ovelman lives in these spaces in more ways than one, and we can wish we did too.
Actually, until these fragile paper bills disappear this world really is a little bit of ours as well.
The following thunbnails are only samples from the rank of images.
UPDATE: the wall remains almost entirely intact (as of last night, May 10)
no porno, though they still seem very intimate. how r those printed? do the white borders indicate a separate sheet? so hundreds of color 8 x 10's wheatpasted? must have cost a pretty penny. Where is this?
At one point I had typed that the visible white lines of the borders of each sheet suggested the viewer was looking through a white-painted multi-paned window sash, but somehow I must have edited that out.
Yes, those lines represent what must have been Ovelman's deliberate decision to show a division between the separate sheets of the individual photocopies, even though it takes six of them to compose the complete picture.