Candela Project Gallery Holzstr.11 Courtyard 80469 Munich Allemagne
In his current series of Polaroids, the Canadian photographer Chad Coombs (born in 1982) creates photo collages, which combine the analog instant photography with the opportunities of digital image processing. Coombs’ womens' heads, which he finds in the internet and in magazines or portraits by himself, serve here as a basis. After the digital and analog revision, the pictures are photographed with a Polaroid camera. Subsequently, the artist works on these analog photographs with pen and paint-brush. The overpaintings and the scribings appear as white ornaments on the Polaroids’ mostly black backgrounds – and resemble therefore the international art nouveau around 1900. Furthermore, Coombs’ techniques of processing refer to another stylistic development at the turn of the century, as his manipulations seize the approach of the then art photographers, who revised negatives and positives with both mechanic and chemical procedures, with the major intention to approximate graphical and pictorial pictures. However, Coombs’ scribings and overpaintings do not lead to an overall pictorial aesthetics, which in general is perceived as beautiful. Instead, his technique emphasizes particular neuralgic parts of the face, mostly mouth and eyes, which he stresses in a lascivious and erotic way. The manipulations alienate the faces and, in parts, skew them up to unrecognizability. Occasionally Coombs overwrites the Polaroids with rephrased lyrics: In his works the familiar song “Sweet dreams are made of these” is continued by the pithy line “all yours are full of disease, lies and untruth”. The alienations’ surreal handwriting complete and underline the statement of the twisted visual motif. Within a spectrum which encompasses everything from exaggerated spotlessness to defacing deformation, the artist Chad Coombs contrasts the illusion of accomplished beauty with the grotesque grimace. Ultimately, he resolves this contrast in distracting dreamlike aesthetics.