Through July 26, 2026
Painting and photography have been rivals and collaborators since the mid-19th century. Many realist painters at the time bemoaned the mechanical nature of photography, crude as we now know it to have been. At the same time, more progressive-minded painters saw the new technology as an aid and an aesthetic stimulus. It goaded art from mere representation to freer forms of expression. Art never remains still, advancing in unpredictable ways with technological and other non-aesthetic changes — a good lesson for our anxious and uncertain digital era.
Two San Francisco artists who marry photography and painting in order to capture the reality of the everyday present parallel exhibits. Painter Anne Subercaseaux creates elegantly minimalist abstractions based on her snapshots of the environment. Patterns of light and shadow, sometimes framed by architectural elements, are condensed into painterly images of subdued mystery and subtle beauty. “I photograph that which catches my eye,” she opines, “then let those images percolate and guide me into painting compositions.” Photographer Nico Van Dongen subjects his images to painstaking digital compositing to create views of Golden Gate Park landscapes that, with their semi-transparent layers, are tremulous, alive and present. They almost breathe and are almost three-dimensional. These landscapes are the visual and emotional antithesis of the precisionist approach associated with the nature photography of Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.
Both artists are inveterate flâneurs, scanning the environment for potential images amid what might at first appear mundane and negligible, or merely pretty and scenic, and therefore beneath serious notice. While the Bay Area is a target-rich environment for the photogenic, Subercaseaux and Van Dongen both avoid these pictorial pitfalls, bringing back what will be transformed by their creative processes into you-are-there epiphanies. “Art is … nature seen through a temperament,” in the almost identical words of the painter Camille Corot and the writer Émile Zola.
Included in Subercaseaux’s “Convergence” are twenty-seven paintings selected from three series, each developed over several years, and probably awaiting new additions. “Reflections: On Crossing” is based on snapshots taken while commuting across the Bay Bridge. “Architectural Simulations” captures the modernist interiors of office spaces in which the artist formerly worked as a draftsman and graphic designer. “La Nature” is inspired by leafy fig-tree shadows cast on a wall in southwestern France. The close, zoomed-in cropping and the square or nearly square formats accentuate the abstract character of the works, which perfectly balance the positive and negative shapes of structures, shadows and oblique planes.
In Subercaseaux’s hands the implied hierarchy of object and shadow becomes fleeting and ambiguous. The rigorous geometry of the pieces (except for “La Nature”) is modulated by her subdued, almost monochromatic palette and her soft-edged application of glazes with invisible brushstrokes. The hard-edged structures and shadows are softened by atmosphere and distance. “Reflections: On Crossing XXV” and “…XXXIV” are representative of the first series, with the asphalt Bay Bridge pavement rendered in blues, grays and browns. The nocturnal light and the shadows of struts and girders sweep diagonally across the frame. Subtly brighter passages suggest light reflected by fog, or the luminous paint of lane-divider stripes struck by headlights. While the geometric compositions are formal, the mood and atmosphere harken back to the poetic, tonal interpretations of James McNeill Whistler and Georges Seurat.
“Interior Space” and “Asymmetry” find unexpected abstract beauty in the workplace. In the former, a semicircular black wedge bisected by a gray vertical represents an arched window or a view into a curved open space supported by columns. Contrasting with this stark geometry is a patch of light spilling onto the curved wall, revealing unseen window mullions and beams that lead up a curved flight of stair steps. In the latter, a similar modernist space with a curved platform and railing, curiously grayed out and indeterminate, resembles the distortions of solarized photographs. “Les Ombres de Sortez” finds subtle beauty and mystery in the shadows projected onto a lawn or a stone wall by an unseen grove of Ficus trees.
Equally intrepid in the exploration and excavation of art from life are Nico Van Dongen’s digital composite photos of Bay Area locations imbued with the slowness, atmosphere and depth that we associate with paintings rather than spray-and-pray digital photography aimed at social-media visual punch. The artist, who has documented the Bay Area’s natural and manmade beauty for decades, considers his work a dialogue between observer and observed. They act as a fluid record of his encounters, rather than as products of a predetermined image or idea.
For this show, titled “Shimmering Presence,” Van Dongen turns his multidimensional photographer’s eye on the arboreal kingdom of Golden Gate Park, close to his home in The Haight, with an attitude of respect and even reverence: “I photograph trees not as fixed objects, but as living presences shifting between my perception, and reality.” The eleven photos in the exhibition reveal the park landscape, so familiar to many of us that it has become a mere backdrop, as a grand amphitheater of living monuments. What we get are nineteenth-century epics minus the old nostalgic classical mythology and the Manifest-Destiny rhetoric. Van Dongen finds half-photographic and half-painterly scenes of mystery and beauty, the “forest primeval” of preindustrial culture, in a highly trafficked urban park.
“Bird of a Spire” depicts Andy Goldsworthy’s “Spire” sculpture in the Presidio. Fabricated of logs that taper to a needle point as it reaches skyward, Goldsworthy’s tower becomes a spiritually charged presence as well as an ordinary avian perch. “Dancing Feathers” catches a small cluster of plant shoots dramatically spotlit to whiten a dark grove, growing toward the bright sky above like swaying ocean kelp. “Fork Tree” and “The Cross” convey anthropomorphic and Christian associations, while “Horse Tree” and “Leaning Twins” suggest the metamorphic transformations inflicted by offended or merciful Greek gods and goddesses.
