Texas photographer Ted Kincaid, exhibiting concurrently at Arthur Roger, seems to reexplore one aspect of the old Romantic impulse — its penchant for exalting the look of nature. Of course, Kincaid’s methods, it must quickly be said, are decidedly of our time.
One of the more curious aspects in the history of photography is the quixotic, and lasting, interest in photographing what can’t be seen. No sooner did the daguerreotype confer the ability to capture reality than early enthusiasts began attempting to use the new device to prove the reality of the unreal.
The permutations of color and image in Ted Kincaid’s photogravures raise, and politely refuse to answer, some heavy questions about modernist seriality and the identity of an individual artwork I’d be tempted to say that Kincaid’s works calculate a post-Warholian logic of pluralized identities and sameness beneath their surfaces, except that it’s nearly impossible to think that there is anything behind the ink on the paper: Like shadows, the gravures live only on the surface, which is appropriate given the light-based chemistry of the photo-intaglio process.