ACCIDENTAL ARCHITECTURE • JAMES STOKOE

Is it a surprise that a fundamental misreading of historical architecture and sculpture of the Greek and Roman periods leads to so much art and architecture to follow? Much of Western art has been shaped by this intentional or accidental response to a faded legacy of color. The typical efforts to reconstruct the truth have a bit of a “Recolor” or “paint by numbers” look. They hardly give the works the “unexpected life” the surrealist artist Rene´ Magritte claimed for his painting of a Venus De Milo in 1931. The photographs in this section, taking another approach to re-animation, compounding the accidental consequences of age, ruin, plunder and misunderstanding with a process that fosters chance. Double and triple images are over printed in a process that does not allow for the easy enforcement of keeping color neatly between the lines.