Lisa Oppenheim’s ‘Landscape Portraits’ are photograms – created when an object is placed directly against photographic paper. Specifically, the American artist uses wafer-thin sections of different types of wood, illuminating them from behind so that their ring patterns are permanently cast as an abstract, black and white image. ‘Cherry’, for instance, is a diptych of fine-lined, pooling, marbled shapes, while ‘Sassafras’, divided into four quadrants, is, suitably, more exotic-looking, with its intense stripe-effect, and ‘Apple’ is a soft, shimmering blur.
In each case, the works’ frames are constructed out of the same wood as in the image – so you sense of a kind of conceptual game being played, the final pieces becoming like an index of their own raw materials. Plus, there’s a nice parallel between the way the photograms were made and the light-dependent process of photosynthesis. Ultimately, though, the main pleasure is simply that of becoming lost in the swirling, mesmerising patterns.