Albertz Benda is pleased to present Thomas Fougeirol and Carrie Yamaoka: a crack in everything, a two-person exhibition on view from January 10th to February 16th, 2019. Showing together for the first time, Fougeirol and Yamaoka both employ painting processes that engage with and subvert the protocols of photography. Unengaged with representation, the artists focus on painting’s potential to record the slippage between the indexical mark and the invisible.

Thomas Fougeirol’s work evokes “a space that exists between radiography, photo negatives, painting, and imprinting…a kind of sensitive machine that defeats expectations.” He embraces the liquidity of paint, applying thick layers that create a seemingly unstable skin on the canvas, a laden membrane on the verge of bursting. He registers the imprints of actions and movements on the surface, drawing out an elusive fluidity from concrete and tangible materials.

Carrie Yamaoka actively engages with error and defect. Working on a reflective ground, she seeks to implicate the viewer in the experience of her work to call into question the stability of our perception. The paintings are charged by the chain of incidents that determine their unforeseeable outcomes. Rubbings of the artist’s studio walls, powders cast into rectangular mold forms, and the crawling of paint resisting adherence to surfaces—these are imperfect tactile records that challenge notions of proof.

An enigmatic 1912 photogram by Géro Bonnet, displayed in the gallery, acts as a kind of cipher to Fougeirol and Yamaoka’s exhibition. A non-artist who experimented with darkroom photography at the turn of the 20th century, Bonnet adopted the then-new technology of photography to create visual proofs of the unseen. According to Bonnet, the photograph depicts magnetic waves of energy emanating from a hand. With this seemingly impossible occurrence, Bonnet, like Fougeirol and Yamaoka, might have found the crack in the process – allowing the light to get in.