Elisheva Biernoff’s Husband’s Family

Since French inventor Joseph Nicéphore Niépce produced what is now the world’s oldest surviving photograph in the mid-1920s—a lonely, ghostly image of a rooftop taken from a window—the medium has inspired a great deal of beauty and melancholy. . As a child, I looked at the images, the family photographs, which were kept in notebooks, in plastic sleeves. Some of the images filled me with a sense of loss, of times spent in a world I would never know. If I didn’t recognize the figures in those pictures, I would ask my mother, or another adult, to identify them. But I didn’t stop there. Once I had a name, I would write it on the back of the photograph, or write a tag and place it carefully near the image. He couldn’t bear for anyone to forget.

Memory, the desire to capture the real self, the longing to be seen and questions of identity permeate Elisheva Biernoff’s fantastically moving and unusual paintings. Working from found, snapshot photographs, Biernoff creates works that match, in size, scale and color, what he sees in the original images. (He even dates the photographs and the texture of the photographic paper, and, on the back of his canvas, reproduces what is on the back of the print.) Still, despite his diligence and incredible attention to detail, or perhaps because of it: his paintings are a memory of the source material, the original reused by a different mind, a different idea of ​​art and attention.

“Fragment”, 2024.

I first saw Biernoff’s work on a trip to San Francisco in 2017. A painting was on view at the Fraenkel Gallery, and I was drawn to it with its emotional beauty, its aura of sadness. Titled “Vision” (2016), the piece measures five and one-eighths by three and a half inches and shows a black woman resting against a waist-high tree root, the fallen tree only partially in frame, woods beyond . The woman’s high-necked white blouse and puffy shoulders evoke something from the 19th century—something from the Old West—as does her denim skirt. We see her in three-quarter profile, looking to her right, soft black hair framing her cherubic brown face, highlighted by a hint of heavenly light. When I first saw the work I thought it was a photograph. Most of the artists shown at Fraenkel are photographers (Arbus, Friedlander, Winogrand, etc.). On closer inspection, Biernoff’s image didn’t look exactly like a photograph; it was less sharp. But it didn’t look like a painting. Watching “Vision,” I couldn’t help but remember the mysterious plastic photographs I’d tried to identify when I longed for everyone in the world to be remembered.

Biernoff is also drawn to mystery. His subjects are people and scenes that attract him, I think, for what they suggest beyond the frame: narratives that continue out of sight. It could be said that the process of remaking an image as a painting is a way for Biernoff to learn about unknown landscapes and their subjects, which are strange to him, and thus deepen the mystery through alchemy. Looking at a Biernoff piece, one stands between known worlds and unknown worlds.

Born in Albuquerque in 1980, Biernoff graduated from Yale in 2002, and seven years later received her master’s degree from the California College of the Arts. In 2009, she was invited to make an installation for a store in the Bayview-Hunters Point section of San Francisco. (He has lived in the city since 2007.) He didn’t know anyone in that neighborhood, so to familiarize himself with the area and its people, he asked the people there if they had any pictures of relatives who want to share with her He made his first photo-based paintings from these images, and when he was finished, he placed the paintings in the shop window, to “create a communal living room wall,” he say

Biernoff’s current show, “Smashed Up House After the Storm,” at the Fraenkel is also about community, but the works here don’t suggest togetherness. Rather, the artist has focused on paintings that speak of a kind of isolation and the precariousness of one’s own home. Among the large works, in an exhibition full of them, is “Strike” (2021), in which a fairly standard two-story white clapboard house is seen at an angle with a dead tree stump nearby. The stump, jagged, with sharp strips of tree and bark extending upward, is just one of the painting’s disjunctive elements. Another is a translucent yellow strip that runs from top to bottom on the right side of the work, as if it is eating the image. A result of overexposure? Too much time in the dev tray?

Works like “After Dark” (2024) are no more dramatic than the momentarily still world in “Strike”; the drama is more explicit. In “After Dark,” a man stands near a tree, a favorite motif of Biernoff’s. Wearing a light-colored shirt, jeans and tinted glasses, he is circling the photographer while looking down at the ground, where something is burning. He is amused, but with what? The photographer? His gesture? The fire? The only constant “story” in Biernoff’s images is the surreal nature of the photograph itself. (In this, he reminds me of another San Francisco-based artist, the late painter Robert Bechtle, whose haunting Southern California scenes often focus on life’s “nothing” moments: a car parked on a sunny street but ominously empty; members of a family staring at the viewer while eating frozen treats.)

“After Dark”, 2024.

In “Smashed Up House After the Storm,” Biernoff makes more of a statement about the architectural elements than in previous shows. “Fragment” (2024), for example, shows a wall from which two images have been removed, leaving faded outlines where they once were, their absence highlighted by a postcard that has been pinned near the empty rectangles. But I found myself less interested in his ideas about space than in how his people live and work there. Two heartbreaks are “Interlude” (2023) and “Gathering” (2022). In the first, a topless man half reclining on a twin bed, a latter-day Madame Récamier. His look is daring: can you see me? What he notices, apart from the wristwatch, is the way her legs cross at the ankle: a “feminine” pose that questions both gender roles and the make-up she appears to be wearing. “Interlude” made me think of another queer image from the family album: Diane Arbus’ “A naked man being a woman, NYC” (1968). In that indelible photograph, a man puts his penis between his legs. He also wears makeup, which contrasts with his dark skin. But Biernoff, unlike Arbus, isn’t looking for living myths to explore; their myths are made in their found photographs.

The extraordinary “Gathering” (2022) feels like the show’s emotional coda. In it, four figures—three women and a child—sit on a sofa. A woman’s arms are crossed; the child’s hands are folded between his legs. But we can’t make out anyone’s face, not in detail. The camera flash bounces off a large mirror above them, lending an aura—an electric sanctity—to the figures who seem to float between the real and the unreal. In this image, Biernoff emphasizes, once again, how little we see, how little we remember, even as we yearn. ♦