“Tania Franco Klein: Long Story Short” at Yancey Richardson in New York: Art Exhibition Review

Is the true self — the face of the psyche — always obscured? Is the truth of ourselves, something so valued and talked about in the contemporary moment, something that we even know how to access?

Tania Franco Klein’s Stirring Photography

I recently saw “Tania Franco Klein: Long Story Short” at Yancey Richardson gallery in New York City, which is a small but bombshell-feeling showcase of the featured artist, a photographer whose exhibited works were all self-portraits. It is actually the first solo exhibition in New York City for Franco Klein, and the photographs immediately stuck with me.

Probably the first element to grab my attention was the warmth — which Klein held at a felt intensity to somehow intermingle comfort, something off-putting, and a heat level that downright pushes you away because of your survival instinct.

Here, the familiar blends with — and is perhaps subsumed by, depending on how the story goes — the perplexing. An extensive hall stretching out to your visual horizon blankets your experience of the present moment, with possibility — suggested by a kind of grandiose flair to some of the visual rhythms — inherent to the surroundings.

What could be feels melded with what is — which is also sharply communicated in the sometimes slightly whimsical nature by which Franco Klein assembles her images, in which she tends not to look directly at the camera while her depicted visage becomes a part of a more sweeping visual tableau.

Mystery disassembles, becoming something experienced as a searing glow across the cacophony of each environment’s characters: objects and settings that in Franco Klein’s handling seem inwardly propulsed. Everything is alive, and talking — and here, that communicative intermingling between subject, background, and beyond feels integral and essential to the very composition of what we’re looking at.

In a couple indoor shots, the lighting is pointedly yellowed, presented alongside areas of darkness that allow you to really feel the particular tone of light.

In “Rounded Mirror, Window (Self-portrait)” from “Break In Case of Emergency” (2022), the wall is a somehow foreboding, lightly heated, high saturation orange, with the wall’s hue moderated by some included shadow. In “Yellow Tiles (Self-portrait)” from “Positive Disintegration” (2017), which was captured in a bathroom, the tiles are — you guessed it — yellow, and yellowed, poignant lighting reaching a cascading, spiritual intensity emanates from a shower where Klein stands.

Soaring Waves of Illuminated Color

The yellows tended to be similar in aesthetic impact to the orange: high saturation and both enveloping as a warm blanket of color but adeptly, artfully off-putting. The heat in these images is just beginning to sting. In a couple of the artist’s exhibited outdoor shots, it’s even quite sunny.

In terms of the structure of the images, Franco Klein’s own visage is always put on a continuum with her surroundings, sometimes retreating right into them. In “Contained (Self-portrait)” from “Positive Disintegration” (2016), she photographed a room in which a distant television displays an apparent image of herself in a largely darkened environment. Franco Klein also photographed a reflection of herself on a toaster. Lived environments such as these are imparted with the tactile feeling of a bodily experience, something disjointed but ultimately expansive in reach: a smooth encompassing of space.

The artist seems to capture a process in which expressed identity ends up in flux. It’s shifting, in dialogue both with itself and the identity that emanates from what’s nearby. It’s under pressure that’s structural and systematic — and like home goods or a bathroom, it’s also constructed. Here, it’s something actively cultivated and put out into the world — and in that, it can be fleeting and changing, though that’s some of the internal beauty of it. For all the simmering, Franco Klein’s images also were strikingly serene.

In “Contained (Self-portrait),” Franco Klein is standing behind a shower door, and there, the image (of self, specifically) could dramatically shift with a change in lighting. The artist’s reflection in a toaster was originally just a flash of recognizable presence on a counter.

Franco Klein also appears alone in these images, though flanked by diverging but always sweeping environments — with a bathroom somehow feeling as enveloping as outdoor environments do in these photos, where she repeatedly appears with sprawling, natural scenery. In the isolated feel of her spotlighted images, Franco Klein casts the management of identity as a still personal project, creating a thread of personhood that links the individual with the environmental.

The Entire Environment, in Dialogue

You feel as though not just Franco Klein but everything you see is looking, waiting, and perhaps expecting — though possibly stuck in a moment when whatever comes next remains absent, just out of your reach.

You yourself, as the viewer, are also looking. In “Car, Window (Self-portrait)” from “Proceed To The Route” (2018), the photo was seemingly captured from the driver’s seat, with Franco Klein on the outside, looking off towards… something and shielding her eyes from the sun. You’re part of the scene, feeling the photographed car reaching out towards your vantage point and looping you into the unfolding surroundings.

You’re waiting, looking — the quiet rhythms of Franco Klein’s visuals make it feel as though everything is interpersonally communicating, though the tone and stature of the scenery is lifted somewhat beyond the strictly individualized. But in that, there’s that chance for a refreshed personhood: consumptive unification of you with what’s around you. And it’s unsatiated, a process looking for more. From everywhere, you feel the yearning to continue the work of the cathedral of personal identity.

”Tania Franco Klein: Long Story Short” continues through December 21, 2024, at Yancey Richardson in New York.

Featured image: “Tania Franco Klein: Long Story Short” (installation view), Yancey Richardson, New York, October 24 – December 21, 2024. Image courtesy of Yancey Richardson.