Cloud gazing with legendary landscape photographer Robert Adams

Of the three Robert Adams solo shows concurrently on view at Fraenkel Gallery, “The Plains, from Memory” is the most visceral, charming undertaking, and a deft change of pace for the legendary photographer. The collection of wood block carvings of expressionistic landscapes shows something photographs rarely get at: The artist’s hand as an extension of his way of seeing, the thing photography delivers in spades. The pieces are hard to pigeonhole in terms of medium, existing at the intersection of sculpture and painting, but are at home in Adams’ oeuvre in offering an extended, revelatory examination of landscape.

If photographs privilege the artist’s eye, the wood blocks (all untitled and all dated 2020) underscore this artist’s ability to see beyond the surface. The first piece in the show is an unaltered piece of wood roughly 5”x 11” and ¾” thick, in which Adams recognized a landscape. It’s easy to make out: The wood grain whorls around the edges of the board like clouds; a knot near the center can be taken for the sun or moon; darker bands of color near the bottom offer a horizon. The whole experience is a bit like cloud gazing, a familiar pastime to anyone who has ever laid out in the sun and tried to make nature’s abstractions figurative.

The show moves from the found landscape to progressively more developed (though never complicated) wood carvings in which the artist further draws out the landscapes trapped in their surfaces with carved lines and stains of ink, with results reminiscent of Milton Avery or Richard Diebenkorn paintings. Standout among these is a pastoral scene of a field under clouds, a mountain range in the background and a tree in the foreground, all achieved with six lines and five colors. The simplicity of Adams’s execution is key here because it is true to its subject: Nature creates nothing in excess. People do that.

Adams was included in the historically seminal 1975 exhibition “New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape” at the International Museum of Photography in Rochester, NY, which recognized a vernacular movement in landscape photography that observed the steady encroachment of human-made infrastructure on the land. The landscapes he offers in his carvings rarely represent human intervention (only one intimates the presence of electrical lines). Perhaps that’s the titular memory he’s drawing on: The time before nature was so disrupted. Or perhaps he’s playing a variation on the theme of “man-altered landscape,” a descriptor that could be applied to his hewn topographies as well.

The adjacent shows stick with photographs: a selection of Adams’ large format prints from the 1980s and ‘90s; and “Sea, Stone, and Other Pictures,” featuring work from the 2010s. It isn’t that the second and third gallery spaces are in any way inferior to “The Plains” — Adams is still and always a consummate photographer — but the wood work is so refreshingly novel that it stands out. What else stands out is how clearly Adams they are, in spite of their departure from photography. Looking at the photographs and then returning to the wood blocks, my first thought was “of course.”

The whole process and its products appear so unassuming and playful it’s almost Platonic: the idea of landscape whittled to its most essential elements. Mark this as the result of Adams’ protracted meditation on the subject, which he’s been photographing just shy of 60 years. While “The Plains” feels like a culmination of this career-long effort, the simple quality with which Adams realizes it is the real master stroke. With mastery, evidently, comes humility.

IF YOU GO:

Robert Adams “Sea Stones & Other Pictures,” “The Plains, from Memory”and “Selection of Large-Scale Prints”

Where: Fraenkel Gallery, 49 Geary St. #450, S.F.

When: 10:30 a.m.-5:30 p.m. Tuesday-Friday, 11 a.m–5 p.m. Saturday, through May 27

Contact: (415) 981-2661, fraenkelgallery.com