James dealt unsuspecting viewers the ultimate illusion from time to time: real space, that is, a hole in the canvas, worked into the composition like an elfin touch of black. This marvelously peculiar device appeared (disappeared?) in James’ previous show, too. Pierced, or burned, in dimensions ranging from tiny quarter inch up to an area of two inches or so of removed canvas, what are the holes doing there?

Perhaps they figure as arch elements in the teasing ambiguity of space and time that keeps James’ pastorales situated within a busy land of paradox. Concocting a system of painterly depiction that pays homage to a European tradition sometimes theorized as the ‘prehistory’ of photography, James’ imagery (as Cohen said) is actually derived from a specific source – photographic images in the Alinari Archive, a mid-19th century collection of ‘views’ of the Italian landscape. The fact that these views are attributed to anonymous photographers reflects the Alinari brothers’ business policy as well as a widely held belief in the 19th and early 20th centuries that the camera’s operation was just like a neutral mechanical eye trained on the lit forms and lens-inflected perspective within its frame (typically, for landscape, a slightly wide-angle focal length). James, by importing these views back (forward?) into twenty-first century contemporary painting practice, excavates a dormant interlude of visual cultural history. The holes reactivate a weird wormhole into the attenuated debate that still – Still! – crops up when artists approach imagistic, realistic representation. David Hockney’s research into the use of lens-assisted paintings dating from the 16th century is perhaps the most recent and sophisticated assertion of these issues’ importance for understanding how two-dimensional visual philosophy, a mix of perceptual and cognitive faculties, was produced historically and by extension relates to the visually saturated present.

In a more speculative sense, the holes in James’ canvases metaphorically refer to the aperture of the camera. They also seem to stand in for the anonymity of the anonymous photographers – the elision of those Alinari Archive employees’ identities. I attended a slide lecture given by James about his work at Cooper Union in the spring of 2002 [Painting Per Se]. Seeing slides of his paintings side by side with their photographic referents from the Alinari Archive was a revelation into his working process. I recalled, the day after the lecture while walking down the street in bright sunlight, that the sun’s rays can
be concentrated by a lens to burn a hole in paper. I thought about the hand ground lenses Galileo used in his telescope to discern the satellites of Jupiter, and stories of Spinoza grinding lenses to provide himself with independent income, the means to pursue his philosophical writing. Metaphorically, James’ gaze into the 19th century past might correspond to a lensless burn of the imagination, a kind of time travel. His work conducts an air of mystery when set within the Chelsea scene.

James dealt unsuspecting viewers the ultimate illusion from time to time: real space, that is, a hole in the canvas, worked into the composition like an elfin touch of black. This marvelously peculiar device appeared (disappeared?) in James’ previous show, too. Pierced, or burned, in dimensions ranging from tiny quarter inch up to an area of two inches or so of removed canvas, what are the holes doing there?

Perhaps they figure as arch elements in the teasing ambiguity of space and time that keeps James’ pastorales situated within a busy land of paradox. Concocting a system of painterly depiction that pays homage to a European tradition sometimes theorized as the ‘prehistory’ of photography, James’ imagery (as Cohen said) is actually derived from a specific source – photographic images in the Alinari Archive, a mid-19th century collection of ‘views’ of the Italian landscape. The fact that these views are attributed to anonymous photographers reflects the Alinari brothers’ business policy as well as a widely held belief in the 19th and early 20th centuries that the camera’s operation was just like a neutral mechanical eye trained on the lit forms and lens-inflected perspective within its frame (typically, for landscape, a slightly wide-angle focal length). James, by importing these views back (forward?) into twenty-first century contemporary painting practice, excavates a dormant interlude of visual cultural history. The holes reactivate a weird wormhole into the attenuated debate that still – Still! – crops up when artists approach imagistic, realistic representation. David Hockney’s research into the use of lens-assisted paintings dating from the 16th century is perhaps the most recent and sophisticated assertion of these issues’ importance for understanding how two-dimensional visual philosophy, a mix of perceptual and cognitive faculties, was produced historically and by extension relates to the visually saturated present.

In a more speculative sense, the holes in James’ canvases metaphorically refer to the aperture of the camera. They also seem to stand in for the anonymity of the anonymous photographers – the elision of those Alinari Archive employees’ identities. I attended a slide lecture given by James about his work at Cooper Union in the spring of 2002 [Painting Per Se]. Seeing slides of his paintings side by side with their photographic referents from the Alinari Archive was a revelation into his working process. I recalled, the day after the lecture while walking down the street in bright sunlight, that the sun’s rays can
be concentrated by a lens to burn a hole in paper. I thought about the hand ground lenses Galileo used in his telescope to discern the satellites of Jupiter, and stories of Spinoza grinding lenses to provide himself with independent income, the means to pursue his philosophical writing. Metaphorically, James’ gaze into the 19th century past might correspond to a lensless burn of the imagination, a kind of time travel. His work conducts an air of mystery when set within the Chelsea scene.