Fading Studies

At the core of Răzvan Anton’s artistic practice is drawing. In his own words, ‘drawing is the most direct path towards a possible image.’ Over the past decade, however, his practice has largely revolved around working with archives and collections of found photographic and film material. Anton’s involvement in the rescue and preservation of the Minerva Archive, his engagement with a vast trove of images, certainly laid the foundation for the practice he consequently developed, using photographic sources as templates for his sun prints. I had the chance to write about his work before, when I was invited by the gallery in 2022 to reflect on the practices of three of its artists and their respective approaches to drawing. But really, between photography, print, and drawing, where exactly do Răzvan Anton’s images belong?

In his previous solo exhibition at Gaep, Studies of Gaze, he showed sun prints and video works based on photographs from the Minerva Archive which captured mostly choreographed and sometimes candid moments of public life. His present exhibition, Fading Studies, serves as its pendant, with the viewpoint now shifting to 8mm footage and a photograph shot by his father in the 1970s and 80s, where family members, friends, and sometimes strangers appear in inevitably candid moments and, occasionally, in semi-staged situations. Anton’s Archival Study (Places and Portraits), a two-channel video loop he made in 2022 from the above mentioned footage, is the link between these two exhibitions. In it, he navigates the tension of personal exposure through the systematic approach of archival classification, much like he did with his previous public archive works. Sequences from his father’s footage are edited in two distinct categories – ‘places’ on the left-hand video channel and ‘portraits’ on the right. Echoing the questions posed in his Minerva sun prints, this work extends Anton’s investigation – or study – into the moving image, focusing on its pictorial taxonomy, attention economy, and the superimposition of the two contrasting authorships. However, it yields a somewhat different result. By applying a classification strategy based on keywords – places and portraits – to home films (precursors to home videos), in other words, to footage that captures the spontaneity of life in its raw, amalgamated form, Anton’s work suggests the impossibility of truly isolating his subjects from their context through linguistic and rather mild formal interventions alone. Though edited in the framework of his study, these glimpses of landscapes, gardens, homes, bodies, and (mostly smiling) faces from his father’s footage remain part of the same disordered, convoluted lived reality. In Siegfried Kracauer’s (1889-1966) words: ‘If you disregard for a moment articulate beliefs, ideological objectives, special undertakings, and the like, there still remain the sorrows and satisfactions, discords and feasts, wants and pursuits, which mark the ordinary business of living. Products of habit and microscopic interaction, they form a resilient texture which changes slowly and survives wars, epidemics, earthquakes, and revolutions. Films tend to explore this texture of everyday life whose composition varies according to place, people, and time.’ [1] This texture of the ‘ordinary business of living’ captured on/in film persists even without an explicit link to specific biographies or places, possessing an archetypal quality beyond its particular context.

If the title of the current exhibition offers any clue about the shift in Anton’s focus, I’d say it suggests a move away from specific narratives carried by images – inevitably historical, political in the case of the Minerva Archive – toward an even deeper exploration of the image’s very condition (and its politics). In this sense, his newest sun prints in fact mark a subtle departure from his earlier ones, even though their technique remains unchanged. Since the biographical aspect is really not central to Anton’s practice – and something he deliberately mitigates through the framework of his technique – it is also not the defining factor that sets this body of work apart from his earlier one. With the ‘burden’ of the political narrative (at least seemingly) lifted, the paradoxical nature of Răzvan Anton’s sun prints becomes more apparent. Fading Studies – the title of both the exhibition and Anton’s latest series of heliographs – is highly suggestive. I read it as deliberately ambiguous, evoking both the study of fading as a phenomenon and the idea of studies (or images) that are themselves fading. In other words, these works emerge through a dual process: exposure to sunlight is both the means of their creation and the agent of their potential dissolution, echoing the processes and dilemmas – particularly the lability of captured images – faced by the earliest practitioners of photography over two centuries ago. It wasn’t just that early photographic images couldn’t be chemically stabilized onto their support (they faded or blackened), but also that, as William Henry Fox Talbot observed, some continued to develop even after stabilization, unexpectedly and surprisingly revealing new details over a certain time period. [2]

Crucially, ‘fading’ points us to the concept of duration, which is integral to how these works come into being – a radically slow process that evokes a pre-industrial sense of time. In stark contrast, this slowness underscores the highly accelerated production/consumption in our current times, where speed and immediacy reign as imperatives. But here, I’d like to return to the heliographs themselves – to what is visible on and within them. In order to do so, it is perhaps worth briefly revisiting Anton’s process: selecting an image, enlarging it, creating transparencies, preparing the image support – A3 sheets neatly covered in undulating traces of ballpoint pen ink – layering these elements, and finally exposing them to daylight for weeks, if not months. Though a chemical process of photodegradation occurs, unlike cyanotypes, no additional chemical is introduced to accelerate the process – here, sunlight reveals the image through the erasure of ink where it makes contact. Extracted from the footage of Archival Study (Places and Portraits), Anton’s Fading Studies elicit a haunting sense of déjà–vu, transposing their source material into textured, monochromatic shadow prints that seem to dissolve into the paper. I would call Anton’s images ‘latent images’ – though with a slight shift in meaning from Brassaï’s original use of the term. Here, what appears latent in this process of revelation – achieved paradoxically through the seemingly negative act of effacement – is the spectral presence of the hand-drawn trace, an additional element in the transaction between reality and the analog photograph. If analog photography is ‘writing with light’, as many have described it, and if it has been conceptualized by some of its theorists as an emanation of its subject – its trace, as it were – then Anton’s sun prints seem to be its productive mise-en-abyme. Unlike the simulacrum, which Jean Baudrillard saw as an image severed from any referential origin, these images foreground their material process and physical transformation. The image emerges as a singular, unrepeatable event shaped by time, ink, and sunlight – an unstable yet persistent trace, resisting the logic of endless reproduction.

At last, if I am to answer where – between photography, print, and drawing – Răzvan Anton’s images belong, I will do so in Roland Barthes’ words: they are ‘clocks for seeing.’ [3]

Text by Mihaela Chiriac

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[1] Siegfried Kracauer, Film Theory: The Redemption of Physical Reality, Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 304.

[2] Kaja Silverman, The Miracle of Analogy or The History of Photography, Part 1, Stanford University Press, 2015, see p. 51 and p. 53.

[3] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida. Reflections on Photography, Hill & Wang Pub, 1982, p. 15.