CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 4/9/2023

In a season of renewal, to look without fear

An image that fills us with longing and some strange sense of mortality—or immortality—“Clipped Tulip” (2020) is reproduced from Wolfgang Tillmans: To look without fear—published to accompany the exhibition on view now at Art Gallery of Ontario en route from MoMA. This is the image we most want to look at right now, as we contemplate the various emotionally-charged overlapping holidays of renewal this week. “For Tillmans, life’s holy mess of ordinary pleasures is not merely catalogued but equalized,” Durga Chew-Bose writes. “The surreal complacency, for instance, of rotting fruit, is given prominence. But so is fresh parsley or half a grapefruit, sucked dry. A single white rose lying on a bed of cherries is funereal. A red pear—its stem erect—seems shy. If his practice shows a preference for what is, an allegiance to parity is essential to how Tillmans documents his worlds. There is no justifying the maple leaf next to the ashtray, next to the kiwi. Tillmans’ still life photography eludes any hierarchic portrayals of the quotidian, harmonizing matter-of-fact materials (like bubble wrap) with romance (like dried flowers). The margins and the middle collide, but more than that, they are in concert. But more than that, they are unsolvable. And isn’t that the point? As the poet and essayist Mary Ruefle notes: ‘It is not what a poem says with its mouth, it’s what a poem does with its eyes.’”