Through a Giant Lens

Ever since photography was developed in the 19th century, painters have been fascinated not only by the camera's objectivity but also by its ability to convey emotion. In the beginning, such drama lay primarily in the camera's power to capture and freeze a random instant in time. But with the arrival of motion pictures, the telephoto lens, journalistic photography and television, the camera has developed a new vocabulary of images. Spain's Juan Genoves, 37, calls it "graphic language, the language of the photographer." In his show at London's Marlborough Fine Art Gallery, he illustrates the chilling resources open to the artist who has learned to parse it for his own artistic ends.

Genoves' subject is the individual pinpointed by the camera in the middle of a crowd. Relying for inspiration on sheaves of photographs and films, he creates shadowy monochromatic canvases filled with silhouettes of dozens of tiny people running, fighting, pathetic, but defiant. Sometimes, beneath the shadow of an unseen airplane, his people stream across an open plaza routed from a riot, or perhaps in some more existential form of flight. Other canvases are composed of a series of panels reminiscent of a strip of movie film or contact prints: La Protesta (the Protest), for example, shows a couple shaking fists in one quarter of the canvas, fleeing in the next, lying dead in a pool of blood in the final half.

When Genoves washes his paintings in green or brown, it seems as though his lenses were equipped with filters. He also employs photography's "zoom lens." Enlargement shows a fleeing crowd on the left; at the right, the eye zeroes in on one figure spotlighted from the mass. Positive. Negative uses another photographic device, showing a slain black couple on a white field, their arms reaching toward their mirror image, a slain white couple on a black background.

Though Genoves lives and works in suburban Madrid, he does not consider his work a critique of the Franco regime. "I want to be a universal painter," he says. "What I am trying to show is that a multitude is not an anonymous mass, but a collection of individuals who would, in an ideal world, each be authentically free."

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