NICO KREBS VS. TAIYO ONORATO
Answering an online compendium’s quest for immediately engaging content, Onorato and Krebs soundly tick the increasingly ubiquitous kooky eyecandy box. There’s a substantial bloggers’ buzz surrounding the photography of Swiss duo Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs (both b. 1979), no doubt partly due to the gently surreal humour that characterises much of their work. Fortunately, there’s more to the duo’s work than instant visual gratification
The artists’ photographs of an extensive American road trip - the most widely distributed online - not only provide perfect access to their combination of illusion, chance and staged realities, but also succeed in establishing a distinctive route through the well-trammelled territory of the American West, a terrain so culturally familiar that, as Krebs put it prior to the journey, “…we already know (it) without ever having been there.” United by a common interest in various strands of deviant reality - accidents of nature, the fortuitously bizarre and their own, objectivity-bending interventions - Onorato and Krebs have been producing whimsically uncertain images since 2003.
In several of the works, simple sculptural props both define and refashion predominant clichás: toy-like lengths of highway loop in endless circles or force new routes through undergrowth, yet are also made subject to tricks of perspective that confound distinction from the real thing.
Part David Lynch, part Fischli and Weiss, Onorato and Krebs’ outsiders’ view of the US functions as a metatextual response to the established tropes of the Road Trip, provoking, as in all their work, an examination of the documentary-style photograph and its specific framework of expectation.
Exctracted from www.modernedition.com
