Jeff Wall, Gestus, 2019

Deep connoisseur of art history, Jeff Wall is known for using the lightbox technique, taken from American commercial and vernacular architecture, but above all for his mise en scène, or the creation of cinematic character sets with real actors on the stage. Beyond the strong impact on the art market, his works have attracted the attention of great critics such as Susan Sontag, Michael Fried or Jean-François Chevrier, and have been elected as a decisive source of inspiration by some of the leading contemporary photographers, from Andreas Gursky to Thomas Ruff.
In the case of Wall, moreover, the activity as an artist is accompanied by a remarkable production of theoretical essays, collected here according to a selection studied exclusively for this edition and divided into two groups: on the one hand the reflections on his own work as a photographer, on the other writings dedicated to some artists such as Roy Arden, Rodney Graham, Stephan Balkenhol, On Kawara, but also to the impressionist painter Édouard Manet. It is a double register from which an acute and competent reconsideration of the means of expression emerges thanks also to a meticulous reflection on techniques and materials, even if there is no lack of lucid speculative digressions in philosophy or architecture (as when, just to give an example, Wall compares the work of Dan Graham with that of Philip Johnson, Robert Venturi and Aldo Rossi). The strength of these writings as a whole lies in obtaining a rigorous and stable bed, in the field of art history, not only for the author’s own work, but above all for photography in general: the most standardized art and more subject to the threats of imposture.