Rødland’s new show, which is currently on view at the David Kordansky Gallery in Chelsea, finds him experimenting with a fresh set of tools and unearthing old, unseen work. A majority of the photographs on display are recent pictures shot with a vintage 35-mm. Rollei 35S, an uncharacteristically low-res format for the artist. Rødland told me that he woke up one morning a few years ago and found himself “thirsty for grain,” owing in part to the advent of A.I.-image-generation models, which Rødland noticed could mimic the kind of high-fidelity, goopy tactility that defined much of his older work.
But the tone of the new pictures also suggests a return to the Romanticism that rankled him in his youth, or at least a lighter, less conflicted touch. Here, Rødland shows us a sweeping French landscape featuring a gnarled tree perched atop a poppy-dotted hill or an image of a woman playing the viola by a placid pond, whose title, “Tavener’s The Lamb,” references a piece by the British composer John Tavener which is adapted from a poem by William Blake. This is not to say that Rødland has gone soft, exactly, though the show does include two tender shots of his own young children. Rather, he is responding to an ambient visual environment in which these kinds of quiet photographs are increasingly out of place. And he has not banished the strange entirely. Take, for instance, a scene featuring a woman in a kind of avant-garde milkmaid ensemble confronting a monstrously tall figure that, upon close examination, is actually a child perched atop a man’s shoulders, wearing a long trench coat.
“Arms,” 2008.Courtesy STANDARD (OSLO)
“The First Curtain,” 2024-26.Courtesy David Kordansky Gallery
Tucked away in the back of the exhibition is a collection of older work, a series of larger, high-res images featuring people in various states of undress. In contrast to the 35-mm. pictures, these works are plainly confrontational: a woman wielding a gigantic, hyper-realistic dildo, with which she has apparently violated an apple pie; a muscly youth who has been tarred and feathered; a statue of one of the three wise men, hands outstretched, receiving a woman’s naked bottom, which glows in the light. Taken alongside his other recent photography, this turn to the flesh might be seen as a complementary probing of the same impulse: When faced with a glut of A.I. slop, how do you break through and truly touch your audience? Whereas the intimate, snapshot-style images call us to bask in the anachronistic warmth of the analog, the profane photographs beckon toward the messy pleasures of the body.