Made between 2005 and 2017, the photographs in Elger Esser’s recent show proposed a sort of conceptual short circuit in which images of granular precision, transposed to dreamlike dimensions, assumed an otherworldly coloration and brilliance. One could discern specific sites visited by the artist during his travels in the Middle East (Egypt, Israel, Lebanon) and France’s Normandy and Giverny—the last setting immediately and deliberately recalling the luminous revolution of plein air painting by Claude Monet and other Impressionists. The absolute realism of these photographic landscapes, evident in the sense that one could recognize and precisely identify their most minimal details, was continuously complicated through their transformation into timeless spaces that in the end had nothing representational or descriptive about them.
