Diptych World: Around the beginning of the...

Diptych World: Around the beginning of the century, many photographers attempted to make their photographs resemble paintings. The Pictorialists wanted viewers to take the new medium as seriously as traditional art forms.

Today, as digitally generated images are replacing lens-based prints, photographers are again turning to painting as a model for their art--but for entirely different reasons.

Over the last few years, Uta Barth has emerged as a leader in this field. Her influential photographs of out-of-focus interiors fuse Gerhard Richter’s blurry painted Realism with the perceptual explorations of the Light and Space movement. At ACME Gallery’s new location near the L.A. County Museum of Art, beautifully refurbished by architect Wayne Schlock, Barth’s new body of work expands her repertoire to include elements skillfully lifted from Cezanne and Seurat.

The surfaces of Barth’s four fairly large diptychs look like no other photographs. One double-view of a tree-lined canal is more delicate than most watercolors. Two pairs of images of white buildings transform the harsh glare of the midday sun into creamy softness that caresses your eyes with palpable loveliness.

The show’s most arresting work is a pair of prints that depicts slightly out-of-sync views of a grove of leafy trees in Vermont. The trees in the far background are in such sharp focus that it seems as if your sight has drastically improved. You feel as if you could read a legal document’s fine print from a few hundred feet.

In the foreground, Barth has managed to capture dozens of leaves flickering in the wind. Their evanescent silhouettes, in a sumptuous rainbow of dazzling greens, recall the jittery energy that animates Cezanne’s faceted landscapes, such as “Forest” (1894) at nearby LACMA.

Like Cezanne’s painting, Barth’s diptych gives vivid form to the way we piece together views of the world as we move through it, concentrating on some elements and taking in others peripherally.

Her two largest works combine Seurat’s Pointillism with the Ben-Day dots of newspaper comics. Sprayed on 10-foot-long canvases by the machines that print computer-generated billboards, these bold photo-transfers are remarkable for their exquisite detail and texture.

In contrast to Pictorialist photography, Barth’s prints do more than mimic their sources. Cool, unsentimental and original, they articulate the moment by catapulting viewers into the future.

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* ACME Gallery, 6150 Wilshire Blvd., (213) 857-5942, through Feb. 21. Closed Sundays and Mondays.