(Bresson spoke of editing as a process of enveloping an image with those on either side.) Diderot, whose Jacques le Fataliste Bresson had adapted in Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (1945), wrote of Chardin's paintings, which employed multiple glazes to achieve their "
vaporous" effects, "Come close and everything becomes blurred, flattened, and disappears; stand back, and everything is recreated and restored." He could be describing the effect of Bresson's two purposively arcane images.
Catherine gasped for hair, as she was winded by the fall, and her faint breath was visible as a grey
vaporous exhalation.
That's in no way to wish for an airy,
vaporous production of one of Williams' grimmest plays, a 1957 Broadway flop that has had to depend on the kindness of English directors (Peter Hall in 1988, Nicholas Hytner here) to reassert its deserved place in the canon.
In one image, Spence dons a gruesome skeleton mask along with her pendant and handbag, while in another, she floats in a
vaporous pool, seemingly at peace.
It had black almond-shaped eyes and seemed slightly
vaporous. It floated away from the fence and quickly vanished round the side of a neighbour's house, chuckling as it went.
When Time Warner threw the switch that blacked out ABC signals for 3.5 million homes in Los Angeles, New York and Houston, it put in concrete what had previously been only
vaporous premonitions by consumer advocates and Disney lobbyists.
The New Museum show, curated by Gary Carrion-Murayari, is titled "Head Gas," and presented paravents (folding screens), drawings of stalks of bamboo, more line drawings capturing faces in haphazard scribbles, and a group of five large canvases showing faces rendered amid
vaporous clouds.
Manu Kadosh's camerawork is heavy on pretty close-ups of the lovers and
vaporous fumes rising over mysterious alleyways.
Similar moments of instability are evident even in some of the artist's most
vaporous canvases--Poodle P% 2006, for example, whose jewelcolored hot spots seem to glow from within a fecal fog, until one realizes that these are simply patches of red, blue, and green that had been left uncovered when the top layer was applied.
Of course, as paintings, viewed at close range, the works display no harsh matrix of photographic grain, the images remaining uniformly smooth,
vaporous, evanescent, and perhaps vaguely toxic.
In Occupations, Kiefer's Nazi salutes are now
vaporous images--imprinted on lead, a toxic element the medieval alchemist attempted to transmute into gold.
And then it appears: Realism gives way to a softer, looser style as Odlund transports you between various levels of "reality." As one reality gives way to the next
vaporous world, the landscape that was already ambiguous becomes ever more so.
With JXXXA-PRRO1-12, 2009, a modestly scaled, prestretched canvas was printed with a line drawing of a Cezanne still life, which Koether then colored in a range of bright and hazy pastels, at times defying the drawing's contours in favor of an allover dispersal: Blushing, sexual pinks and gossamer gold applied in loose, transparent brushstrokes appear
vaporous as they leak beyond the skeletal black contours of the outlined Cezanne.
John Chiara's highly crafted, unique Cibachrome prints address these topical concerns through intensely analog actions producing images of
vaporous, sometimes acid-tinged apocalyptic beauty.
