Mediterranean color [antikvár]

Foreword Paul Goldberger Jei Jeffrey Beoom's photographs are more brilliantly poised between abstraction and realism than any others I have ever seen. Or is it that they are poised between photography and painting? Or between the making of art and the documentation of architecture? Jeffrey Becom, like all important artists, has carved out his own territory, one that exists not above or beyond the territory we have seen before, but in the middle of it, in the interstices between the worlds that we already know. His photographs are abstract and realistic, at once; it is in the making of that balance, the finding of a world in between, that his art lies. Jeffrey Becom has two missions: the documentation of a disappearing architectural culture and the creation of beautiful works of art. He is not the first photographer to have attempted to combine these often contradictory goals—it is hard not to think of Atget in Paris, or of Walker Evans in the United States—but he does it more freshly, more carefully, and finally more joyfully than any photographer in our time. The particular architectural culture of the brightly painted stucco vernacular of the Mediterranean countries that he has chosen to photograph would in anyone's hands, of course, yield different images from those of Atget or Evans; Jeffrey Becom's training as both a painter and an architect accentuates the differences still more. His photographs are lush, and they are vivid as a color-field painting; also like a painting, they deal in surface more than space. It is the walls that are the reality of the building to Jeffrey Becom, not the space within. Yet his passion for the architectural thing itself, for the building and for the life that goes on within it, is everywhere apparent. These images are testaments to his love of where he goes and what he sees. The sheer richness of the photographs, in which color becomes a painterly presence, is enough to show us that. The color is what strikes the observer first: it is both intense and subtle, and printed so well that it becomes a sensuous thing in itself. The colors leap out at us, yet they are not at all intrusive; the perfection ofthe composition, the way in which these images seem so right within their frames, holds everything in check and brings a kind of restraint that the pigment itself does not always possess. Thus in Blue Wall, Burano, Italy