Michael Grecco, "Urban Landscapes"

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“Daylight is too easy. What i want is difficult - the atmosphere of lamps and moonlight.”

- Edgar Degas *1

Michael Grecco’s night is full of light.

He is a moonwalker, a somnambulist whose conscious and unconscious are not blinded by the brights of oncoming traffic or swallowed into shadows. He is enthralled by the radiance within the blackness.

He seeks rapture, a narcosis of color.

Grecco’s “Urban Landscapes” are vividly colored panoramic photographs shot in mostly unidentifiable locations around the world. These places seem alien and exotic, showered in vibrant, lucent, sometimes iridescent almost radioactive colors in raking rays, revealed in squiggles, planes, and circles.

The colors are contemporary. The sources are incandescent and neon and other; they are otherworldly yet familiar. They come at us in shimmering blasts or arching beacons of hue.

Through long exposure, selective focus, shallow depth of field, blurring and wide framing, Grecco finds his way in the dark and leads us. He is our guide here.

Up close we encounter a maze of tints and tones. When you look at these works across the room, you’re struck by the sweep of the frame and the vibrancy of the color. There is a chartreuse yellow field bisected by red. A glowing green nebula burns white at its center while zapped by bolts of red and yellow. There is a sine curve of cobalt lying on the rust ochre wall lit from below. There is the mad interplay of trapezoids - magenta, blue, red, yellow pink and green looking - like a prison break in some imagined Candyland.

Grecco dances ecstatically through the color spectrum.

In the studio and on location, he is a virtuoso of lighting technique. That skill has obviously sharpened his eye and instincts in locating these chromatic landscapes as he travels the city after dark. Further all of what happens is “in camera”, in his panoramic Hasselblad. He is the magic.

A few of these works are more muted, in brown and yellow, but It is revealing of something that, most often, there is a person in the frame, sometimes in silhouette or shadow, but present.

It is as if the artist is finding himself - or by extension you or me - here and assuring us that these places are habitable and not unfriendly, airless Mars-scapes. The image of dolphins at play with a person in an electric sea is lyrical, personal and poetic. It’s us.

This the nighttime in the Michael Grecco“Urban Landscapes”.

Often there is difficulty in the so-called fine art world in appreciating work by an artist like Grecco whose practice is most significantly and successfully commercial. For example, there is an odd divide with Roe Etheridge or Christopher Williams or James Welling who present in galleries as photo-based “conceptual” artists. Yet their work looks distinctly “commercial” while accompanied by formal critical support and investigation. We could include the photographers Michael Wolf or Robert Polidori in this argument.

It is all about context.

The Michael Grecco “Urban Landscapes” are completely conceptual, well seen and executed, with the artist’s empathic sensitivity to what he sees.

Sixty years ago, the legendary photographer Ernst Haas (1921-1986) made this journey. Haas was interested in "transforming an object from what it is to what you want it to be.”*2 Beyond the physical place, person, or object he depicted, Haas hoped to reflect the joy of looking and of human experience. MoMA curator John Szarkowski said of Haas that “he makes color sensation itself the subject matter of his world”.*3

Grecco wants “to contextualize man and his/her place in their environments they create, in the artifices they live in. I go out every day with the intention of breaking visual rules, to create an evocative, cinematic image that inspires - in its format, composition and color.”

Like Haas, Grecco began as a photojournalist shooting in black and white. He now shoots “color with the intention of using the color as effectively as possible, with a deep interest in architecture and our surroundings drawing from the graphic nature of the structures when creating these images.”

Both men find visual music in color, not single notes or longer phrases even melodies, but rhapsodies, within the frame. That is how the abstraction works.

It does, nonetheless, play on us in silence, this music of the night.

*1 “Jean Sutherland Boggs Edgar Degas”, “Degas [exposition]”, p.535, Metropolitan Museum of Art, (1988).

*2 Erwin Bach, “Exhibit Includes 176 Prints,” Chicago Daily Tribune, November 1, 1962, W4.

*3 Press Release, MoMA Archives.

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