Christopher Rauschenberg, "Italy 2026"
by Matthew Kangas
Nine Gallery Portland
Continuing through September 26, 2026
The 17 untitled color photographs and photo-collages that Christopher Rauschenberg shows in “Italy 2026” are just the latest tip of the iceberg, that is, of a lifetime of photographing sites throughout the world. Focusing exclusively on Italy this year, Rauschenberg has extended his technique of mixing straight-on views with what he calls his “push-together” images, combinations within the same frame that might or might not be from the same location. The approach results in an embrace of the world through a blending of often off-kilter recognitions of familiar tourist sites with obscure positions of the camera that force us to accept the artist’s unusual attitude toward the familiar.
The works are displayed in a single row, showing alternations of single-view shots and mashups that composite two, three or even four different images within the same frame. Satirizing and confounding traditional tourist postcard mannerisms, Rauschenberg consistently alters the expected toward an unexpected outcome. As he once put it, ”I want the ordinary to appear un-ordinary.”
Traces of Rauschenberg’s earliest work are evident in the reappearance of mundane still lifes, as in the bedside-table view of an electric iron with its sunny, mirrored reflection cast on the wall. Such tight interior views eventually gave way to the expansive outdoor vistas and the highly selective views of museum interiors. The latter have been the subject of two prior collections of his work, “Museum 1” and “Museum 2” (2022). One critic in the late 1970s named Rauschenberg and a group of other Portland photographers the “Gee Whiz School,” as in “Gee whiz, how can something so dumb seem so eerie or fascinating?” Further aestheticizing the dull object is one photograph’s allusion to Man Ray’s famous “Gift” (1921), an altered readymade of an iron with nails inserted into the steam holes.
The new Italian photographs continue the pairing of the everyday with the aesthetic not only of museum interiors but of the artworks themselves, as in the panoramic mixtures of Pompeii and Herculaneum ruins with interiors of more recent architectural staircases. Elsewhere, Rauschenberg seems intent on conflating the preciousness of the artwork with its inevitable commercialization, as in a wide view of plastic tote bags with pictures of a Madonna piled next to a Roy Lichtenstein woman’s head turned into its own bag or tea towel.
Toying with deep perspective, in the same frame two color views of narrow streets on the Isle of Capri contrast a bright outdoor sunlight view against a gloomy darkened alleyway filled with refuse. Another, wider view focuses on Italian traffic danger signs, including one trampled beneath the wheel of a sports car. These are adjacent to formally restful images of Pompeiian bedrooms with their inhabitants encased. This is the closest the artist comes to any sort of social commentary, much of which depends on the juxtaposition of the past with the present or the crassness of the commercial (as only modern Italy can do it) with the sublimity of Italy’s art-historical past.
This past-and-present trope is another underlying thread of continuity in Rauschenberg’s art, most notably in his well-received book and two accompanying museum exhibitions, “Paris Changing: Revisiting Atget’s Paris” (2007) which re-photographed fin-de-siècle French photographer Eugène Atget’s many storefront and street scenes of Paris taken between 1898 and 1906. Displayed at the International Center of Photography in New York and The George Eastman House in Rochester, New York (where the original Atget prints reside), Rauschenberg’s 1997-98 labor of love shared with other photographers such as Mark Klett, Terry Toedtemeier, JoAnn Verburg and Ellen Manchester an exploration of the history of photography to establish an art-historical pedigree for its documentary origins.
Some of the wider mixed-image combinations at first appear to share little from image to image within each frame. Inspected more closely, however, they examine, for instance, the evolving interpretation of the female figure from Gothic and Renaissance times down through the ages to present-day cheesy Italian movie-star pinups and kitschy nude figurines. Without generalizing about the Italians’ tendency to reduce masterpieces to chocolate box pictures, Rauschenberg slyly points out their sense of ownership of such a cultural heritage, free to celebrate art, the female nude, and chocolate candies at once.
In this sense, Rauschenberg’s encounter with Italy addresses past and present, seen through the multiple lenses of architecture, art, and consumer products — all without the presence of a single human figure. Thus, we see the subjectivity of the artist’s head-on confrontation with Italy, transforming its myriad extravagances into a tight, overweening aesthetic of inclusion and transformation.
Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas
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