John White Cerasulo

John White Cerasulo often refers to the works in his latest series Complete + Verified as “The Girls”: “The girls are at the framers,” he says, or “I chose the last of the girls this week,” or “I hope all the girls can be in the show.” His casual and intimate relationship with the subjects of these works indicates a sensitivity that is not immediately apparent in their formal presentation and aloof titles such as bc_j-n05.jpg or bc_et073.jpg. The titles represent the original file names of the images on the artist’s hard drive, and yet each jpeg is as familiar to the artist as if it signified the name of the human subject. Although the virtual “girls” are enlivened by Cerasulo’s personal response to them, the presentation of the works threatens their tangibility. Each piece is quite large – forty by fifty-five inches – but the images themselves are small, framed within wide white paper margins. The aesthetic effect of this structure is that the subjects seem far away from the viewer, as though they are gently receding.

Cerasulo began “making” these photographs in Janurary of 2000. After finding them in a newsgroup on the web, he crops them and adds a series of Photoshop filters and blurs. In bc_zen20.jpg, the plants and objects in the background of the photograph have been softened and seem nearly translucent, as if they have been painted with watercolors. Cerasulo considers the computer and the Internet a bank of visual resources as well as a collection of tools that can be used in the same productive capacity as a brush or paint.

The digitally produced photographs are from a series of manipulated Eastern European teen erotica images called The Black Cat Scans. The newsgroup source Cerasulo uses functions as a virtual forum for ideas, sparking dialogue and commentary on images. Once users have acquired what they need to complete a series of images, they use the term “Complete + verified,” which means they are done downloading. Because the exchanges among the community of users are not conducted in real time, individuals must post their status so that others may be able to go to them and request particular images. “Complete + verified” indicates that the user is available as a resource for desirable images. Cerasulo claims, “I’ve essentially received what I needed from the group, and now I’m ready to give back in the form of an image exhibition.” His process mirrors the virtual and shared space of viewers, who discuss, introduce, and swap images. People who post their ideas to the newsgroup ask questions about the images, collect anonymously, and browse in much the same way that art appreciators venture through a gallery. What makes Cerasulo’s project both generous and transgressive is that he takes the images that are stored by and distributed among a small anonymous population of computer users and transplants them into a public sphere – the gallery. Cropping an image shifts its original perspective to more subtle and suggestive angles, while the blurring endows the work with a painterly aesthetic.

The original images Cerasulo uses date back to the early 1980s. His final works, though, have both a vintage/retro and a contemporary feel to them. He describes the work as possessing “a kind of faux but sincerely nostalgic and romantic quality that seems fresh but somehow impossible due to their origin and the process in which they are made.” The shy beauty of the images functions both as an enticement and a trick, ingenuous and unabashedly tempting. The photographs suggest shampoo commercials from the 1980s, illustrations from old magazines, the lighting of sets of bygone television shows and such films as Robert Altman’s The Long Good-bye and The Virgin Suicides, directed by Sofia Coppola. The piece that completes the series, bc_AM2D5B~1.jpg, issues a more provocative and insistent step forward. Here, a naked girl sits on a horse, her face gazing calmly at the viewer, her body fully exposed. The image is utterly straightforward as the dynamic center of the series.

The works in Complete + verified evoke a sense of ephemeral beauty while being at the same time cold, technical, and eerily unreal. The formal quality of the presentation endows the series with a sense that the girls have been collected and taken out of time. Ultimately, the power of the series comes from the tension between the narrative of its construction and the luminosity of its subject matter.

—Monika Gehlawat