Contact Information
resoundings@gmail.com
"It has become clear that Bill Fontana is not concerned with an image and its corresponding or not-corresponding soundtrack. In fact, as much as his practice has tested time and again the relationship to the "iconic," his interest is rather how event patterns intersect in a complex interaction between foreground and background. All viewers are trained in discerning these parameters of the visual field. But with Fontana, it is an audiovisual field recording, enhanced and abstracted in real time or in post-production. We know that the cables set in motion horizontally or vertically as in Studies for Acoustical Visions of the Eiffel Tower (2012) correspond to one of the most iconic places of the Western hemisphere. We have seen this too many times, whether in real life or on postcards. What needs to be shown is the way that these icons are based on the vibrancy of the microscopic vie won matter, granularity, or detail set in motion and related to the macroscopic totality, whether it is a mechanical construction or a natural configuration as in Desert Soundings (2014), where the grain of sand alone evoques the image of the shifting dune. This charged relationship between concreteness and abstraction is nowhere more visible than iin his most recent work for Linz, Linear Visions (2014), where the dramatically concrete is temporarily disolved in a composition of pure colors of moving matter. The camera and the microphone allow a close-up and attention to the material events which would be impossible to achieve with the human eye and ear simply because of the exposure to the heat and noise of steel manufacturing: it is the recording media that allow a new experience. This is the sound that makes the image AND it is the image that makes the sound. Sound and visuals support each other, no leading or supporting role can be identified in this interaction. Fontana's audiovisual art is, I would conclude, not a surrealist art of collage but a materialist art of abstraction. It is the grain of sand that evokes the desert, it is the pattern of sand shifting that evokes a place as the very foundation of the works on view in this exhibition"
- Rudolf Frieling, Media Arts Curator, SFMOMA