Hank Ehrenfried: Under the Impression

Ehrenfried's canvases are the products of his experiments within an archive he has built over several years, an accumulation of found and sought-out materials that includes auction catalogs, gay erotica, instructional guides for amateur artists, museum guides, lifestyle magazines, personal photographs, and other ephemera. He compiles these into unique collages that explore the subtle similarities of form, word, and concept among their disparate contents. Dissatisfied with simply juxtaposing these images, Ehrenfried tears, cuts, folds, and recombines them in improvisatory fashion to foreground these correspondences as well as the objects' materiality. The artist then hangs these collages on the walls of his studio and paints them from life as trompe l'œil. The resulting work is an arresting memorial to these materials, whose unexpected resemblance brought them together for a brief moment in the artist's eye.

The exhibition title, Under the Impression, refers to the multiple manipulations involved in the translation of Ehrenfried's archival materials into collage and finally into painting. Each of these operations-from the selection of constituent elements to the construction and rendering of the whole-mediates the viewer's experience of the artist's initial images, producing only an impression of their significance. The last of these also involves a more literal impression, of a three-dimensional collage pressed into two-dimensional space. Ehrenfried's paintings join both of these implications of the term, the metaphorical flattening of the image through its reproduction and the physical flattening on the plane of the canvas. In doing so they play with notions of originality and iterability, of the relative value of first and multiple impressions. The illusions of these paintings prompt viewers to reconsider the familiarity of their contents in light of this economy of reproduction.