Exhibition Review: Sophie Calle at Fraenkel Gallery
By Amanda Samimi
SOPHIE CALLE: BECAUSE
23 Jan 2020 – 21 Mar 2020
French artist Sophie Calle has gained international prominence as an artistic individualist who over 40 years has produced work that crosses and dissolves genre boundaries. Currently exhibiting at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco this winter, her art appears yet again to be an extension of her life – in all of its fictions and verities. Her widely-known practice of merging text with her photographic work takes on a different orientation in this series of new works. Each photograph is concealed by a felt curtain embroidered with Calle’s writing. The viewer encounters the text before the photograph, inverting the usual order in which images in the gallery space are read. Holding a fascination with the slightly odd yet meaningful and rich, her work’s playful humor and forthright emotional expression directly engage the viewer, allowing one to feel a glimpse of Calle’s personal life in a type of measured intimacy and meditative acquaintanceship.
In She’s Dead, 2018, Calle presents a film still of Rosellini’s Italian neo-realist drama Rome, Open City (1945) featuring Marcello Pagliero, Calle’s stepfather. The black-and-white scene shows Pagliero distressed as he hears the words “she’s dead.” The text on the blue cloth covering the photograph states that when Calle watches this scene she can’t help but hear her stepfather telling her that her mother has died. This piece linguistically externalizes the artist’s affective response to a piece of visual media loaded with personal significance, giving the viewer access to her unique emotional lens in a matter-of-fact yet intimate articulation. Using both text and image allows her work to connect with the viewer on the duel levels of written text and visual object, which give her conceptual work more avenues to access the viewer’s contemplation.
Calle has a knack for being able to transfer the emotion of her experiences into art, such as in La Coupole, 2018, which adds a melancholy dimension onto the already sullen genre of still-life imagery. An empty ceramic coffee cup, restaurant checks, and bowties are spread out across white button up shirts resembling linens. The text on the black cloth covering the image provides context, obliquely referencing the somber closing of La Coupole, a restaurant that upon closing “will lose its soul” as Calle, the restaurant’s last customer, collects the shirts and ties of its waiters. Calle’s deep connection to the establishment is textually embodied through the line “because of the pangs of sadness.” Once again the viewer is situated in the artist’s poignant and impassioned emotional lens as she shares a personal pathos rooted in the place and time of the exterior world.
Staying true to her cast of carefully controlled intimacy, these photographic and textual pairings appear to function as representations of the artist’s eyes and thoughts – or what she sees and thinks. And though these images and words appear guarded, as appropriate for the white box space, they nonetheless remain genuine to the sentiment of the emotional experiences she attempts to capture.
She’s Dead, 2018, Sophie Calle. Image Courtesy of Fraenkel Gallery.
