The Brooklyn Rail

Cubist Juan Gris defined painting as “flat colored architecture.” In the digital prints now on view at Sargent’s Daughters, architect Erin O’Keefe provides an opportunity to reflect on this proposition. Her title, I saw the man with a telescope, hints at the spatial compression and the role of a lens in these highly mediated photographs of studio set-ups, flattened through the eye of the camera. What could be seen as abstractly generated shapes, virtual products of Photoshop, are actually the surfaces of solid wooden blocks, cut with a bandsaw, painted in vivid hues, and posed on colored tabletops against colored backdrops. These set-ups are made to be flattened through the camera’s “surrogate eye.”

More than displays of technological trickery, O’Keefe’s photographs are imaginative investigations organized with great formal intelligence. Rich plastic effects fuse painting, sculpture, and architecture in compositions driven by the tension between two and three dimensions. These forces are generated by the careful juxtaposition and lighting of the blocks, which the camera forges into puzzling, hybrid objects. The show recalls the Metropolitan’s 2023 Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition, which also questioned our habits of perception and assumptions about the reality of depicted objects; here, trompe l’oeil is the work of photography, and the images evoke cubism through O’Keefe’s inventive play with the constraints imposed by the camera’s limited viewpoint.

The flat blocks are generally cut with a right angle on one side and a complex curved edge, like a section of decorative molding, on the other. This generates a cubistic vocabulary suggesting figures, architectural spaces, landscapes, and still lifes. Dense, gestural folds take on personalities. For all her photographic expertise, O’Keefe devotes a lot of attention to painting, coloring her library of props with Flashe pigments, including an especially rich, luminous black, and varying their application from flat to roughly scumbled or thinly veiled. There is a tactility here that the camera transforms into virtual light with uncanny effects, especially in the ribbon-like undulating edges that tend to flip disconcertingly from convex to concave. In Take It Slow (all works 2024), one of the easier images to decode, two curved blocks meet at their apex, defining a violin-shaped opening onto a geometric interior. There’s a hyperrealism to the resultant digital prints mounted on aluminum panels, and by restricting them to the conventional one-point perspective of the camera lens, O’Keefe recovers the revelatory effect of early Renaissance painting. The crisply-rendered angle of a shadow in Signal and the rudimentary box in Holding, for instance, each evoke the highly crafted Sienese panel paintings currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum, where three-dimensional forms emerge from the gilded flatness of Byzantine icons.

O’Keefe complicates matters by subdividing the edges and surfaces of her blocks into zones of differing colors, generating the unfurling, bicolored ribbons of This Way and the transparent duet of Me Feeling Your Feeling. Her transformations of space reflect her architectural training, ranging from the Baroque topological puzzle of Cursive, which evokes Gilles Deleuze’s analysis of “infinite folds,” to the more frontal, translucent planes of Run Through. She has an affinity for the Pittura Metafisica of Giorgio Morandi, with its allusions to drafting tables and uncanny empty spaces, while Hangout recalls the empty urban landscapes of Morandi’s fellow traveler Giorgio de Chirico. Signal and its more complicated partner Three Ways, the most abstract works in the show—“flat colored architecture” indeed—extend the mystery of Pittura Metafisica towards the surreal, introducing patterns of enigmatic black dots (collaged paper circles) that float against geometric planes. Are these lenses also trained on us? They inspire reflection on the process of interpretation itself, visual and conceptual, that’s central to O’Keefe’s work— another sort of “fold.” Given the special conditions at work in her visual fields, we assume that the dots are subject to the same spatial regime. Indeed, planes here cast shadows, and the three dots in Signal differ in size, their diameters reflecting their relative positions on floor, wall, and background. The centrally aligned dots in Three Ways seem securely locked in the architecture of the frame, but the panel behind the lower one is skewed. Is the ellipse on the floor a distorted circle or a flat shape? (The circle is actually a distorted mirror reflection of the ellipse.)

Reflections of real signs suspended in virtual space remind us of René Magritte’s warning about the “treachery of images,” while the severe, minimalist design also points to the realm of Donald Judd’s uncategorizable “specific objects.” They approach, too, the photographic wall reliefs of Ethan Ryman which also, in more restrained colors, engage structurally with the threshold of the wall and the space of bas-relief. Bathed in virtual light, O’Keefe’s alluring and allusive work extends the pictorial tradition, exposing the strangeness built into our cyber-enhanced perceptual systems.