“Every shot is the narrative and the narrative is every shot.” from “Devotional Cinema” by Nathaniel Dorsky

Peter Blum is pleased to announce an exhibition of photographic works by Nathaniel Dorsky. Film Stills is the first exhibition of the artist’s work at Peter Blum Gallery on view at 20 West 57th Street, New York. There will be an opening reception on Thursday November 19, from 6 to 8 p.m. The exhibition runs through January 9, 2016.

Nathaniel Dorsky’s photographs extract intimate moments of observation from his acclaimed silent films. This exhibition features a suite of 30 archival pigment prints that distill the poetic spatial layering of the films. If Dorsky’s films are like a waking dream, then the film stills are a memory of that dream—a crystallization of the meditative state achieved by the moving image and an absolute value by which to measure the fleetingness of our collective existence.

"With a delicate and unique clarity of focus, the serenely silent 16mm films of Bay Area treasure Nathaniel Dorsky embody a mindful concern for the epiphanies of each passing moment and a rare sensitivity to the ephemeralities of light. In celebration of the Bay Area premiere of four new films—each deeply concerned the delicacy and sorrow of being alive in the world—we present three silent evenings (and one afternoon) of this master filmmaker’s most recent works." — Steve Polta

The exhibition that MuMa dedicates to Nicolas de Staël gives us the opportunity to question the materiality of the image. Light as a raw material. It passes through the eye of a painter who restores it in his landscapes: glowing in the South, changing in the North. In the films of Nathaniel Dorsky and Paul Clipson, it flows into the camera lens and fixes into film, writing that subtle partition of clear and dark, revealing the optical magic of the recording device.

Device set aside by practitioners of direct cinema, cameraless film, who paint directly on the film as Stan Brakhage and Emmanuel Lefrant. The film strip is no longer simply the space where the image is formed, it increases in thickness and becomes the concrete support of the pictorial material. A different material for the image, the pixel has only temporal reality, but may be subject to speculation. In the work of Jacques Perconte, compressions and decompressions allow passages from the figurative to the abstract, without opposing them, as in the painting of Staël.