By Stefene Russell
In 1966, a Chicago bellhop named Ted Serios became famous for claiming that he could burn images onto Polaroid film with the power of his mind. Holding a little black tube he called a “gizmo” to his forehead, he’d tremble, stare at a blank wall and press the button. Sometimes, there’d be a burst of an image in the center of the frame: a stone building in sepia tones, so blurry it appeared to be melting, or an unidentifiable factory. Sleight of hand or no, they were haunting pictures.
That mysterious atmosphere resides in Dan Gualdoni’s work, too, but his process is nothing like a psychic photographer’s. He works methodically—his background is in printmaking—but his work feels eerie and bottomless. His tiny landscape paintings, usually no larger than a sheet of typing paper, remind you of someplace you’ve been, but you can’t quite remember where.
“People will say, ‘That reminds me of Maine,’ or ‘That reminds me of the Jersey shore,’” he says. “But it has more to do with the meaning of a large sky and bodies of water and thin strips of land. They’re about a place, but they’re fictions; I view them as internal landscapes that reflect certain qualities of mood or temperament or light and atmosphere.”
People often mistake his small canvases for photographs, but the only photos involved are snapshots he cribs from to create plausible clouds or shorelines. The monochromatic palette and reflective surface look photographic, but they’re too deep to be photos; the scene “rolls out or folds in” from the viewer.
“There might be a little bit of smoke and mirrors,” he admits, “but, if you look at the painting long enough, you begin to see the layering.”
The first layer is matte board, which is laminated, scratched and stained with watercolors (or wine, applied with an eyedropper) to “suggest a composition and introduce some visual noise.” The image is then sealed with white glue, allowing him to apply printmaking techniques like scratching lines on the glossy surface with a razor and rubbing ink into them. The topography is brushed or wiped into shape after a coat of paint is rolled on.
“If I’m not able to convince myself of being there, it really doesn’t happen very well,” he says of his work. “Only when I believe in the place, where I’m able to ‘go’ to it, do some nice things happen. If everything works in a spectacular way, I have the image pretty quickly. If not, it can be excruciating in terms of how long it can go on, in terms of developing it.”
Though diminutive, the finished pieces are powerful. “They’re slow to reveal themselves,” Gualdoni says, “but every day, depending on what the light situation is, or changes in the viewer, they’ll resonate differently.”
