Paul Pfeiffer

"Paul Pfeiffer's stunning projection loop, Morning after the Deluge, for which the artist filmed dazzling Cape Cod sunrises and sunsets and digitally fused them into a single image, may seem like a departure from his small-scale video works. In many ways, Morning  is Pfeiffer's most "realistic" work, the one most grounded in nature. It continually shifts in scale from the macro (the changing spatial relationships of massive objects in the solar system - the Earth and the Sun - recorded in real time) to the micro (minute details such as birds, insects or jet trails captured in high resolution video using a digital beta camera)." (Jane Farver in Exhib. Cat., Ibid, p. 43)

Morning after the Deluge is a effortlessly poetic and beautiful projection loop, which pays tribute to an important influence: J.M.W Turner’s Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) - Morning After the Deluge (1843) and, more specifically, Jonathan Crary’s enlightening posthumous analysis of that painting in his groundbreaking book Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century. In this book, Crary examined a radical shift in our understanding of vision that took place between the 18th and 19th centuries. Attempting to pinpoint the reasons for this change and the exact moment of change, he traced various philosophical, medical, scientific, and technological developments of the times. Interestingly enough, he investigations concluded that this moment does not, as one might expect, coincide with the invention of photography in 1839, nor the beginnings of Modernist painting in the 1870s but actually in the 1840s with Goethe’s theories on light and colour and Turner’s “visionary” paintings of the sun. Goethe had focused his attention not on the single beam of light that poured through the aperture of the camera obscura but on the temporal effects of the afterimage on the way that the mind constructed perception. As such, Turner suffused his paintings of the sun around this time with a radiant yellow, which had no fixed source of light but instead flooded the vision to such an extent that distance between the observer and the observed was eradicated. Thus, with the blurring of the image and the integration of feeling as a response to colour, perception itself became the object of vision.

Pfeiffer may well be hinting at a similar breakthrough in contemporary society’s ways of seeing. The startling progress in computer technology over the past decade has irreversibly altered our perceptions of the world and our place within it.  While these developments continue to stretch boundaries for visualisation, allowing people and places to be removed or inserted at the click of a mouse, they have also prompted serious debate concerning potential widespread (mis)use of this technology and its possible consequences.  In a world which has become increasingly dominated by visual representation, Paul Pfeiffer encourages us to reassess our conventional attitudes regarding identity, space, race, and reality through his reworking of found images on video-loop projections, and in so doing explores the impending risks that go hand-in-hand with technological progress.

Study for Morning after the Deluge begins with a white-hot sun hovering mid-frame in a dazzling red sky.  Gradually, a deep blue ribbon of waves descends from the top of the screen to partially obscure the fixed, setting sun.  Simultaneously, day breaks on the upper edge of the descending band of surging dark waves, which continues to creep slowly towards the bottom of the frame before disappearing altogether.  The sequence therefore finishes as it started, with the ominously burning sun suspended against a dramatic orange background, the colours of which beg comparison with Monet’s powerful Impression, Sunrise  of 1872 (Collection Musée Marmottan, Paris), a painting which is now widely recognised as the beginning of Impressionism.  Despite the viewer’s familiarity with dawn and dusk, the image surpasses comprehension leaving the observer in a state of inquisitive though pleasurable confusion.

Pfeiffer’s Morning strikes a delicate balance between the immediate reward of visual pleasure, and the gradual but ultimately more enlightening reward of focused contemplation.  Through his adaptation of existing images, Pfeiffer uses the "ready-made" moving image in a new and innovative way, just as Andy Warhol, John Baldessari and Richard Prince used the static one.  His digital reworking here of a landscape with a sunset (or sunrise) - one of painting’s oldest tropes – testifies to the power and potential of computer-aided imagery.  As Pfeiffer reflects, “The repeated image is inherently mesmerising, like watching a fireplace, or like a moth to a flame.  It’s like a visual addiction, something pleasurable that’s hard to resist.”  (Paul Pfeiffer in Exhibition Catalogue, Paul Pfeiffer, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2003, p. 34)