"Poppy"

pigment-based inkjet print on aluminum on Diasec

The Poppies spawned from a larger body of experimental work; the ‘Crypto-Actions’ of 1982. The actions set out to make photographic images chemically ‘disappear’ and to explore action based processes that resurfaced the images in novel transformations. These works in particular use a chemical reactivation process that turns the silver gelatin of the image into halogen silver. This makes the image ‘disappear’. In a second step in the process the halogen sliver is then turned into sodium silver by daylight. This is done gradually by the artist through a gestural process. These works transform the medium of photography into a performative mode akin to painting.
(Stephan Reusse, 2015)