Photography versus painting

Elina Brotherus' work is on a par with the masters of painting and photography, writes Billy Leahy

The New Art by Elina Brotherus. Temple Bar Gallery, 5-9 Temple Bar, Dublin 2. 01 6710073. www.templebargallery.com. Until 5 July

Painting has been declared dead so many times it has become a tired cliché. On each occasion that it appeared a new media had arrived to make it conceptually and aesthetically redundant, it bounced back as fervent as ever with renewed purpose and vigour through its ever-surprising versatility.

Perhaps the biggest threat painting has had to see off arrived in the latter part of the nineteenth century with the advent of photography. Seen, and indeed taken, at the time as a major threat to realism, photography pushed painting into a corner, from which it came out fighting with a left-hook of abstraction and right-hand of cubism. From the first exchanges on, the relationship between photography and painting has been an interesting one and has provided fertile ground for examination for both artist and critic.

This is the territory in which the Finnish photographer Elina Brotherus is currently situated. The Paris-based artist's current exhibition The New Painting at the Temple Bar Gallery and Studios takes three of the main tenets of painting – the female nude, portraiture and landscape – and examines them with a photographer's lens. Brotherus adopts key concerns and challenges of classical painting 'light, colour, composition, figures in space, projection of the three-dimensional into the two-dimensional' and approaches them through her media.

Much has been made of the departure of The New Painting series, which dates from 2000-2004, from her previous work, which centred on very personal moments in her own life. However, this is not really the case. If we consider that Brotherus presented these personal moments to demonstrate the profound sameness of human beings, putting them forward as a "blank screen" for viewers to project their own feelings and desires, we can see how she has used the personal material to address more universal concerns.

In The New Painting this relationship is only slightly different, if more complex. Brotherus again uses herself as a model, but this time it is primarily classical painting, and not self-portraiture, that informs the images. Once more, general and universal preoccupations are present with Brotherus investigating the place and order of the human figure in the natural world.

But the element of the personal is also there as she looks at her own place and position – and perhaps even that of photography itself – within the context of art history and of course in relation to the dominant media of painting. This is a readdressing of the concerns and visual aesthetic of classical painting through photography and stands as almost a reply to photo-realism, where the painter uses photography as source material.

The photograph did not kill painting – far from it. In fact, one could even see the two media as enjoying a symbiotic relationship. And it is the crossover territory between painting and photography on a purely compositional and aesthetic level that dominates Brotherus' work. These are images that drag up age-old questions such as whether painting is still relevant and what the exact nature is of photography within art. But ultimately these have been posed and answered so many times that Brotherus has understandably treated them as a mere side-product of her work. The New Painting is a visual experience and Brotherus' treatment of light, colour and composition, as a photographer, is on a par with the masters of both media.