Michael Weinstein

Among the fifteen painters and painter-photographers in this wide-ranging show exploring the relations between the media they deploy, German photo-artist Marc Luders goes farthest beyond sheer interest in the effects produced by combining disparate arts. Luders shoots straightforward color photos of urban landscapes--mainly muddy, stony and rutted lots and construction sites--and then paints isolated human figures into his prints in an impressionist style. Neither trading on the illusionism of photo-realism--as do other artists in the exhibit--nor heightening the contrast between the fictive figure and the photographed environment, Luders renders his subjects as convincing enough to be taken seriously as inhabitants of the actual world, yet sufficiently exceptional to make us focus on the ways they represent distinct moods and attitudes; in one, for example, a man stands in a rubble-strewn lot, hands on hips and head cast down--the essence of glum banality.

"Painting on Photography: Photography on Painting" shows at the Museum of Contemporary Photography, 600 South Michigan, (312)663-5554, through July 21.

(2005-06-15)

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