No Legend,

2005

Jonathan Callan’s art involves acts of occlusion, creative demolition, and radical rearrangement. He has described himself as exploring "the relationship of disembodied knowledge to embodied experience and materiality" — a task that calls for wrestling with such "knowledgeable" everyday objects as maps, books, toys, and photographs. <em>No Legend</em> is an enlarged color photograph of a woodland scene that Callan has overpainted in white, leaving a thin gap of unpainted surface peeking through wherever two colors abut. The result resembles a paint-by-numbers canvas or a page in a coloring book. Through his exercise of close optical and manual attention, Callan undoes the camera’s visual logic; he converts the chromogenic print — product of an implacable chemical-mechanical process, generations in the making — into a subtractive drawing, like the worked surface of a carved woodblock. By translating a photograph into the physical language of drawing, Callan obliges himself to think his way through every millimeter of the image. By reducing everything in the multicolored scene (tree trunks, ferns, sky, etc.) to flat white, the notionally "empty" origin of all pictorial procedures, he re-authors the picture in a way that reads very much like erasure.