May 25 – July 2, 2016
Alan Klotz Gallery
740 West End Avenue, Suite 52 | New York, NY 10025
Carl Chiarenza is a photographic renaissance man. He is first and foremost a terrifically inventive, and endlessly curious maker of photographic images. Garry Winogrand was fond of saying, when asked why he shot a particular scene, that "I wanted to see what that looked like photographed". There's a lot packed into that little zinger, about photography, representation, transformation, and the object that is the resulting photograph. Although it isn't always obvious, Carl is really a concrete kind of guy. He makes, and works from collages that he constructs from this and that, sometimes literally from garbage, and torn scraps. The act of photographing these collages, stimulates the artist's mind, first, while constructing them, then, while transforming them into a new object, the photograph, which refers grudgingly back to the objects of which they are reflections, (Chiarenza says he does not keep the collages. He throws them away... ashes to ashes, as it were), but now they are something else, something "other". They have become vessels containing wonder, and mystery. Einstein said, "One of the most beautiful things we can experience is the mysterious,.... It is the source of all true science and art. He who can no longer pause to wonder is as good as dead." Chiarenza doesn't just pause there... he lives there!
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