John Stezaker's brand of alchemy on display at Whitechapel Gallery
As you step into this show, wide eyes stare at you from photographs on the walls.
Moving closer, you see that these are collages: John Stezaker has taken two copies of vintage publicity stills of unnamed and, to me, unknown actors.
He has sliced one photograph in half at the eyes, and added in a strip cut from the eyes of the other image.
Stezaker's intervention into the photographs is simple but the effect is mesmerising. The actors' gaze is magnified to almost comic-book proportions, but it is also eerily intensified.
Whitechapel's excellent exhibition is Stezaker's first major career survey, yet he has been manipulating photographs and magazine pages over the past four decades.
Working in isolation from dominant movements and tendencies in British art over this time, he has created a body of work which is genuinely unique.
The show is organised in themed groups, reflecting the discrete strands Stezaker has developed, often over several years.
In the Masks series, he overlays postcards of landscapes over film stills or portraits, so that the heads of the protagonists are replaced by details in the landscapes.
In Sonata (2009), for instance, a thicket by a river in a postcard of Killarney, Ireland, stands in for the head of a woman playing the piano in a photograph.
From these two ordinary scenes, Stezaker creates a deeply mysterious image which instantly evokes the connection between landscape and music - you feel that you enter the woman's reverie as she plays, or tap into a distant memory.
Rather than using digital techniques, Stezaker cuts and glues the source photographs. This artisanal approach makes the results all the more uncanny - however transparently the collage is constructed, we are still ensnared by the vision it creates.
This is especially extreme in the Marriage series, where male and female portraits are joined to create bizarre hybrid faces. In one, a mustachioed man is joined to a soft-focus young woman: their collaged union is absurd, even monstrous, and yet utterly believable and deeply enigmatic. Such is Stezaker's particular brand of alchemy.
Until March 18 (020 7522 7888, whitechapelgallery.org)
John Stezaker
Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
City of London
E1 7QX
