George Legrady: Scratching the Surface RCM Galerie 32 rue de Lille, Paris

George Legrady, Saudi TV (1987), Fuji jetgraphix, ink jet works on paper 

By JOSEPH NECHVATAL February 7, 2025

I see him as a spiritual grandson of the great Hungarian art-and-technology artist László Moholy-Nagy and as the son of the Experiments in Art and Technology collective. Born in Hungary, photographer turned digital artist George Legrady has often mentioned his interest in the visual semiotic writings of Roland Barthes. In RCM Galerie’s show Scratching the Surface, I was able to see the early work from the mid-1980s that bares that interest out: Fuji jetgraphix inkjet prints from his legendary series Noise-Signal (1986-1990). That work was part Legrady’s post-modern task to explore the relationship of language to iconic representation within the context of television broadcasting just as it enters the digital revolution. Indeed, Legrady titled his first exhibition of Truevision Targa 168 prints From Noise to Signal.

A Research Grant and an IBM Project Socrates Grant in 1986 provided Legrady an early, affordable digital graphic imaging system called Targa—by which his screen captured images could be digitized and reworked through computer code. In the mid-80s Legrady printed fifty-seven of these Targa pieces at the Jetgraphix studio, which used a then new Fuji inkjet technology to print on archival paper from a Targa digital file, but that technology was short lived.

George Legrady Studio with Targa System, Los Angeles in 1988

The exhibition also encompasses some new work: Legrady’s more recent work with data visualization—tapestries woven from images made with AI technology—but the title of the show comes from the digital print Beneath the Surface, Scratching the Surface that was made in 1988.

In the eighties, Legrady’s interest turned to computers and computer-generated and digitally altered images. With respect to how photography and television began to move into information technology, the body of early work in Scratching the Surface connects Legrady thematically with that of Matthias Groebel, as I saw in his 2023 exhibition A Change in Weather (Broadcast Material 1989-2001) at the Kunstverein für die Rheinlande und Westfalen in Düsseldorf. Both artists are now unmissable when major issues are debated in discussions of electronic media and painting within the art world. Art historian Patrick Frank, has devoted an entire chapter on Legrady within his recent art history book Art of the 1980s: As If the Digital Mattered in which he states that Legrady’s are the first born-digital photographs to be printed and exhibited as works of art. One of Legrady’s inkjet prints—Koppel (1986)—from the series Authority of the News—graces the cover.

Following Legrady’s photographic series Catalogue of Found Objects (1976) and Floating Objects (1980)—in which he strove to decontextualize found objects—like Groebel, Legrady began creating art works by Duchampian appropriation: taking screenshots from live television feeds. In Legrady’s case, news feeds. Thus Legrady appears in his early work to be straddling the Pictures Generation approach to art and their interest in representational imagery, mass media, simulacrum, quotation, excerption, framing, and staging and the algorithmic work of the digital art pioneers, like dancer Deborah Hay’s Nude Portrait by Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon, Studies in Perception #1 (1966).

 Kenneth Knowlton and Leon Harmon, Studies in Perception #1 (Deborah Hay Nude Portrait) (1966)

Indeed, Legrady learned computer programming in the art studio of the painter Harold Cohen in 1981, but had to wait until 1986 to gain access to hardware technology that allowed for the capturing, digitizing and transforming multiple tone-scaled digital images.   

The result of the RCM Galerie bringing together many examples of these prints resulted in an unsettling yet thought-provoking atmosphere that got me reflecting on my experienced history of media consumer culture that felt both nostalgic and inscrutable. The show tossed me into a basket of retro aesthetics (Max Headroom, the movie and Devo album covers came to mind) by combining generally muted colors and fuzzy forms within symmetrical cinematic-like compositions.

Such an 80s style utilized photomontage and collage staging to create faux television scenes that juxtaposed unexpected elements: like abstracted white human male figures with floating black noise boxes.

Video noise seems here Legrady’s element of societal critique for what the television transmits in the absence of a signal. This aspect reengaged my memories with scenes from the 1983 Canadian movie Videodrome that was directed by David Cronenberg.

 George Legrady, Scratching The Surface RMC Gallery Installation View 

Guns and Cocaine (Contragate) (1987), 23.5x28.5”, limited edition Fuji jetgraphix inkjet print on paper

 5 Plates (1987), 23.5x28.5”, limited edition Fuji jetgraphix inkjet print on paper

For Guns and Cocaine (Contragate) and 5 Plates (and others), Legrady focused on deconstructing pixel-based photographs through the exploration of noise as an aesthetic element. The subject of noise became for Legrady a means to understand the power of image processing and the critical issues of how computation may impact on representation and belief, given the fact that the digital photograph is so easily manipulated at the pixel level in comparison to the chemical-based photo image. Like in the Cronenberg film, Legrady envisioned the noise in this work to symbolize a sort of awful dread and even mendacity.

The basic, if muddied, image of Guns and Cocaine (Contragate) is a row of automatic rifles leaning against a wall behind stacks of bags of cocaine. The lower two frames hold head shots of random news commentators, framed as traditional talking heads. Patrick Frank explains that Guns and Cocaine (Contragate) has to do with several airplane-owning drug smugglers, some of whom were also high-ranking members of Contra militias. Some witnesses who appeared before Congressional committees in the summer of 1987 testified to the links between the Contras, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the drug trade; even stating that some of the Contra arms-supply flights also carried drugs.

Such is the nature of the postmodern political game that Legrady was playing with the relationship between images and texts ripped from the perspective of news TV. In the RCM show we see many examples of when Legrady appropriated news graphics that accompanied reports from several cities around the world.

George Legrady, Unconfirmed (1987), Fuji jetgraphix, ink jet works on paper

These kinds of digital still images, that Legrady produced at that time, required the acquisition of computational hardware and programming skills. Thus a new form of artistic practice was created. As Frank tells it, creating images through computer code was a major discovery for Legrady as it seemed a natural step to someone coming out of a photographic background, where the exploration shifted from recording images through an optical-mechanical device to constructing images by both staging and manipulating in a post-production process.

The largest centered window in Guns and Cocaine (Contragate) holds a panel of noise which Legrady created by randomizing an image file. It seems to reproduce what was then broadcast television noise: what is left after the TV signal was cut late at night. For this attraction to noise Legrady was inspired by Information Theory’s definitions of noise and signal as sketched out by the mathematician Claude Shannon.  

In 1956, after the Soviet invasion of his birth country of Hungary, his family immigrated to Canada where they settled in Montreal. Legrady studied photography at Montreal’s Loyola College in 1969 with Charles Gagnon and John Max and at Goddard College in Vermont in 1972. These studies led him at first to a photographic practice that was social and documentary, although artists like Gagnon sensitized him to formal abstract issues, as well. It was, however, upon obtaining a master of fine arts degree from the San Francisco Art Institute in 1976 that Legrady’s real trajectory as an artist started. Legrady has written: “The images that I make are not so much a result of my particular individual authorship, but rather, shaped and channeled through institutionalized conventions that led to the camera being designed in a particular way and the photograph resulting in a particular standardized form.” That seems why he learned computer programming and kept pursuing his photographic concerns using computers.

Though it reads now as rather naïve in our present time, Legrady has also written that “one of my goals in working with computers and computer programming was to introduce works that would somehow test the boundary between the believable and the simulated.” In our post-truth post-photographic age, this seems to be more of a curse than a blessing. WM

George Legrady: Scratching the Surface

RCM Galerie

32 rue de Lille, Paris 7

December 17^th 2024 to February 16^th 2025