Art Review

Poetic Photos: Rocky Schenck’s new photographs at Paul Kopeikin Gallery borrow heavily from Symbolist, Pictorialist and Surrealist forerunners but still muster a life of their own as moody, brooding tone poems. Schenck, who works as a writer and director of music videos in L.A., pays overt homage to Edvard Munch’s charged landscapes in one picture of dark, leafless trees against a foggy gray ground. Another, of trees casting heavy shadows onto the marshy foreground, looks uncannily like an early Edward Steichen.

The deep, dense blacks in these toned silver gelatin prints endow them with a tactile beauty that is consistently seductive, even when the imagery itself is cliched. Schenck’s best efforts invite a narrative--but gently, by giving the suggestion of human presence through cast-off evidence or surrogates.

“London Dress Shop” is striking in this regard, a cousin to Eugene Atget’s haunting Parisian storefront photographs of the 1920s, which were embraced by French Surrealists for their dream-like atmosphere. Schenck’s image shows two headless, armless mannequins, one luminous in a white gown, the other a shadowy specter, seeming to watch the first from afar. The emotional dynamic that emerges in the scene is palpable, though constructed entirely out of absence.

In another of Schenck’s prints, an empty hotel room’s wrinkled bedding and gleaming television evoke a recent presence. In a photograph of empty conference chairs askew around a table, the image’s soft focus and dramatic tones make the scene appear like a stage set, not altogether empty.

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* Paul Kopeikin Gallery, 138 N. La Brea Ave., (213) 937-0765. Through March 3.