Sun-Times Show April 13, 1980

Jane Wenger’s new work of the last two years is being shown through April 29 at the Landfall Press Gallery, 215 W. Superior. Curated by Carol Ehlers of Frumkin Photographs, it is a good-looking exhibit of disturbing impact. Using a 35-mm. camera and strobe lighting, the Chicago artist began with a theme of “faces in pain,” but that title is now gone, and the work stands as a more general exercise in extreme candor. The subjects are often weightlifters. A few look like derelicts. All are shown, big and very close up, as Wenger’s camera sweeps across World War I trench-scapes of flesh lines, warts, hairs, squinting eyes, ferocious teeth, and draperies of time-taxed skin.

You think of Richard Avedon’s cold portraits, but Avedon’s subjects look like death—Wenger’s, often grimacing with exertion, are still pumping the iron of life. (Some of her extreme close-ups, however, are subtly, if not offensively, dehumanizing.) These faces are reminiscent of the têtes d’expression, portrait busts of caricatural types used in 19th-century academic training. But the difference is crucial: Wenger leaves far behind the smooth surfaces of plaster and marble to use, with a glee of voyeurism, photography’s gift for the totally tangible. And that would make her art cruel, if her harsh, superb compositions did not give these skin-scapes a formal dressing, so that they become topographies of light and shadow.