Daniel Bodner’s latest paintings deepen his exploration of the relationship between painting and photography and their respective means of depicting light. In his shift to images that he generates unconsciously, he depicts scenes that are not real spaces but instead ones that emerge from memory or dreams. Like both old photographs and our memories, they seem degraded by time, neglect, and the limits of what can be recalled.
Now, as digital photography replaces the analog photographic process, its invisible, instantaneous mechanism erases the drama of an image taking shape, as well as its potential for error. Bodner probes the simultaneous creation and destruction of images that can occur in the analog photographic process, with its trickiness of over and under exposure, unintended chemical reactions, and the physicality of its technology.
By moving from scenes drawn from the world around us to an unconscious approach to creating images, Bodner depicts that drama, as if the paintings are literally developing as we look at them, with both creation and destruction happening at once.