Elger Esser's Haunted Landscapes at Thaddaeus Ropac Paris

Elger Esser's first Parisian solo show at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac (November 20, 2002 – January 7, 2003) presented photographs taken in Venice and along the Normandy coast. The artist, born in 1967 in Düsseldorf and a student of the Bechers, explores memory and 19th-century visual culture, particularly landscape painting. Critic Thierry Davila notes that while some images, like a Venice scene with a man standing on a boat facing a gray seascape, too literally reference Caspar David Friedrich's rear-view figures, others succeed in evoking memory's uncertainty. Among the stronger works are a photograph of Venetian architecture poised at the edge of fog (not in the exhibition but held by the gallery), a view of Étretat probing remnants of art history, and linear horizons that reduce noise to present landscape as precarious and serene. Esser's images, when not overly assertive, achieve an incertitude that questions what and how to remember, placing him in a lineage of artists who pose such questions through photography.