Imperfect snapshots transformed into art
Elisheva Biernoff lovingly recreates castoff photos in meticulous detail
Elisheva Biernoff isn’t out to trick anyone, but the San Francisco artist does enjoy inducing bewilderment in people when they first see one of her small, meticulously detailed paintings.
So even when visitors are aware that all 12 works in the new exhibition “Elisheva Biernoff: Starting from Wrong,” on view at Fraenkel Gallery in San Francisco through May 28, are hyperrealistic recreations of vintage snapshots, it’s hard to make the brain believe they aren’t just old photos she found in a shoebox.
The paintings capture casual, even banal moments, yet they take on a deeper gravitas through Biernoff ’s scrupulous sustained attention.
Each are recreated perfectly to scale (no larger than 4 by 5 inches) on 1⁄32inch hobby shop plywood and are painted on both sides, exhibited on stands allowing the viewer to see them from various perspectives.
Every seemingly insignificant detail and original flaw is there: the signs of wear and fading; inopportune light bleeds and sun flares; even the random jottings and date stamps on the back of the prints.
It’s no wonder that the most common reaction viewers have is a double take.
“There’s something a little off that makes you want to peer closer,” Biernoff told The Chronicle by phone from her Inner Richmond home. “I’m trying to create room for doubt about what it is you’re looking at, and I’m making a commentary about things not being what they seem.
“To achieve that, the paintings have to masquerade pretty plausibly as photographs in order to disorient and absorb the viewer in looking really closely and asking, ‘What is this?’ ”
On the back of “Ripple,” a fuzzy blackandwhite composition of two men casting deep shadows in the sand, bleached of recognizable details, someone once scribbled (and Biernoff has painted) on the verso: “Can’t figure out why the waves unless it’s the heat? Do you have any idea?”
For Biernoff, who is from New Mexico and moved to San Francisco in 2007 to attend the master of fine arts program at California College of the Arts, ambiguity itself is often the draw.
“I’m examining other people’s mementos, but their memories remain locked and kind of mysterious to me,” she said.
Biernoff described working, sometimes for up to four months on a single image, in a state of heightened visual absorption. It’s a process she developed almost a decade ago when she first painted from found photos for an “Art in Storefronts” program in BayviewHunters Point.
“I kind of chanced into this work,” she said. “I had no idea it would be such a rich, fertile ground for exploration for so many years.”
All the paintings in the new Fraenkel show were made since 2017, “the year I started focusing particularly on (photographic) ‘failures’ and ‘mistakes,’ ” Biernoff said. She began selecting images expressly for their idiosyncratic flaws rather than for the intended subjects themselves.
“I know there’s something absurd about lovingly recreating a mistake, but by laboring over them, I think they become charged with meaning in a new way. The entire emphasis changes.”
While her technique is remarkable — fine brushes, countless layers of acrylic paint, reserves of patience — ultimately there is something more poetic at work in Biernoff ’s recent paintings than in most photorealism.
“It’s Elisheva’s specific choice of imagery and what those choices suggest and engender in the viewer that makes them special,” said Fraenkel Gallery President Frish Brandt. “What continues to intrigue and impress us about her work is the profundity of her
pursuit. In what seems so ordinary, her work becomes extraordinary.”
In the last couple of years, particularly during the Trump administration, Biernoff started working for the first time on images devoid of figures entirely because she was “fed up ... with politics and people’s cruelty towards one another.” Focusing on light, sun and nearabstract color fields was a welcome respite from the political noise.
“Instant,” based on a Polaroid of the ocean, has a jagged darkgray emulsion problem bisecting a shot of lightdappled water. We imagine who’s behind the camera, not in front of it. “But the most recent painting I did (“Signal”) is a light flare that looks like a rainbow,” Biernoff explained, “so there’s a little hope in that message too.”