For its first exhibition dedicated to photography, versus the occasional appearance in a group show, the year-old Seimandi & Leprieur Gallery is hosting the German-born, Los Angeles–based photographer Michael EB Detto’s show Another Room. But his is hardly a straightforward approach, neither to his medium or to his subjects, in which familiar settings and scenes are freely reframed and recontextualized.
Detto is contending with very real places, in Los Angeles, but also Buenos Aires, Cambodia, Budapest, and elsewhere, but with an abstract impulse in tow. He seems to be on the hunt for the feel and the “secret life” of buildings, in one sense, through cropping and finding visual life in the devilish and Godly details.
That alternative eye is apparent from the two pieces greeting the visitor, in the gallery windows. While very different, both bear titles that invite interpretation beyond what we immediately see and detect is going on. “Milky Way of Death” finds a shimmering image of silvery fish — which is, in fact, a group of dead sardines, killed by natural oceanic forces, in Redondo Beach. But, literal subject aside, the image could evoke a canopy of stars in the Milky Way.
“Eurydice,” a 1989 image from Venice (California), is a raw-edged, fragile shot of a Venice street, as viewed and filtered through a shop window and a ghostly silhouetted mannequin, who we take for the tragic, mythical, and underworldly Eurydice.
Maybe partly because of his “outsider” status as a German, Detto brings a fresh eye to L.A. and her architecture. Whereas others dwell on the romanticism and novelty of famed L.A. buildings, Detto avoids such slavish adulation, instead heading out on a search mission. “Google” depicts the Santa Monica campus of the behemoth force that is Google and reduces it to a close-up detail of lines and curved forms somehow suggestive of Leger’s “machine Cubism.”
[Click to enlarge] Left: “Eurydice” by Michael EB Detto | Photo: Seimandi & Leprieur; Top Right: “In Romania” by Michael EB Detto | Photo: Seimandi & Leprieur; Bottom Right: “2020” by Michael EB Detto | Photo: Seimandi & Leprieur
“House in Venice” says nothing specifically about Venice, or a recognizable house structure. It is a veritable abstraction of organized trapezoidal shapes, offset by the reality check of signs of life in the windows. The coyly titled “Building” is a streamlined geometric study of line and shadow taking its name from the word as shadow on the wall.
Words count for more in his series from Buenos Aires, in which short, mysterious texts adorn the images, as in the image of distorted city reflections in the windows of a large building, colored by the floating text “I thought I saw myself. That was a mistake.”
Things turn chilling in the image called “Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum,” from Phnom Penn. Ragged and chipped, old and decaying prison walls evince implied echoes of Khmer Rouge horrors — this building’s own private secret life.
On a brighter note, Detto also sometimes leans into the winds of art historical references, directly and otherwise. “For de Chirico,” an apparently abandoned building beneath a sensuous clouded sky in Rome, strikes an atmospheric chord suggestive of the famed Italian surrealist Giorgio de Chirico’s paintings. “The View” could be a tribute to René Magritte, with its framed-within-a-frame compositional tactic — a landscape view framed in the rectangular openings of a brick wall at Meteor Crater Center in Winslow, Arizona.
The show’s title work, “Another Room,” is attached to another design-driven geometric abstraction, aiming for the “feel” of a Buenos Aires building, with no interest in supplying a definitive representation of the structure as it lives on the street. Similarly, the power of “A Wall” plays off of the stark, side-by-side contrast of a rough jagged gray wall in crisp focus on the right of the picture and, on the left half, a soft-focus and clean blue-lined skyscraper.
With this image, as elsewhere in this intriguing show, he unveils dualities and buried conceptual treasures in urban contexts. These pictures also serve more purely as visual games and poetry. There is, indeed, more than meets the eye.
Another Room, Michael EB Detto is on view at Seimandi & Leprieur Gallery (33 West Anapamu Street) through September 27. See seimandileprieur.com.
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