“Because everything must collapse into nothingness if it wants to live in the Being” Johann Wolfang von Goethe, One and Everything.
ART IN AMERICA. article by Daniel Belasco. March 2005
…Elinor Milchan has invented a wonderful photographic process. She takes time-laps photographs of colored light that she reflects on a white canvas or wall in her studio… Milchan’s large format opens up the interstices of light to obtain a full spectrum of tonality. In the spirit of Nabokov rolling each syllable of “Lo-li-ta” across the tip of Humbert’s tongue, Milchan savors the limpidity of her images. Seven works in this vein from 2003 and 2004, ranging from single panels nearly 6 feet square to several polyptychs, were recently on view in the first solo show by the self-taught artist, a New York resident born in Israel and raised in Paris and Los Angeles. The strongest piece was Motion (2003), a grid of 12 photographs. With colors seeming to blend across the edges of the individual frames, the piece is a more expansive version of Gerhard Richter’s formalist color charts. Milchan’s sensuous fields of light and dark hues suggest remains: fingertip traces on fogged glass, a receding wave, foam against glistening sand. Infinitely (2003) most overtly depicts a trajectory of light frozen by time lapse as two dramatic shocks of blue crisscross against a softer purple field. The diptych Cross Roads (2003) shows a gossamer arc of pinks and violets, evoking a silk scarf discarded in haste. Milchan, like generations of abstract photographers before her, liberates the medium from its function as an index of the world. It seems as if critics are forever rehearsing the contingency of the photograph, yet it takes artists like Milchan to remind us that the essential subject of photography is light itself.