MARNINART

Time isn't kind to color photos. Pull out those '70s-era snapshots and see what I mean. For photographers hoping to match the life expectancy of their color output to that of a Rembrandt: Good luck.

Milan-born photographer Bianca Sforni worries about preservation. She loves working in color but fears those inevitable tonal shifts. Her desire to circumvent time's toll has led her to archival printing techniques, including the closely guarded Fresson process developed in France. But for her latest works, on view through Nov. 18 at Marninart Gallery, Sforni used a process performed at Ataraxia Studio, a 10-minute drive outside Philadelphia. At Ataraxia, stable pigments -- not the dyes used in traditional color processes -- are affixed to the paper's surface. Prints are made in the manner of a silk-screen: Light is shot through a positive (transparency), which in turn hits a layer of pigments that adhere to the paper. Four shots are made, one for each color -- cyan, magenta, yellow and black. (It's not unlike the four-color separations of offset printing used for the color pages of this newspaper.) This rigmarole is expensive and time-consuming, but Sforni cherishes the payoff: Pigment will outlast fading and color shifts under ideal -- and very dim -- museum lighting conditions for more than 500 years. Not only does the process satisfy Sforni's preservation anxieties, but it also gives her prints a painterly surface. Unlike the typical color print's even plane, the face of these pigment prints varies in depth and texture. Angle your head a bit and watch the play of light on the surface and you'll see that some areas are satiny, some glossy, depending on the amount of pigment. As for colors, they're rich and saturated: Flowers are crimson with yellow highlights. The pink lights of a nightclub burn fuchsia. Yet all that punchy color never smarts. Instead, it's a sensual treat. These twin themes -- of preservation and of sensual experience -- inform Sforni's subject matter, too. She's intent on capturing and freezing ephemeral pleasures. Her portraits of a flower indigenous to the Nevada desert are lovingly shot, some with the flower bud tightly rolled up or, more beautifully, with its tendrils unfurling in five fingerlike petals. At Marninart, a trio of these red flower pictures, printed in rich pigment, are some of the strongest in the show. Shot against a flat gray background, the buds approach abstraction but manage also to resemble other things -- for me, an architect's computer models came to mind. Alongside these evocative pictures, Sforni shows pictures of exotic dancers shot inside strip clubs. Lit by spotlights that translate into electric colors in her prints, the performers are washed in an unearthly glow.  The artist's large-scale black-and-white silver gelatin prints, also on view, coax erotic content from their subjects. One, of the tapered column of a pistol cartridge that Sforni printed more than six feet tall, takes on the shape of a human body. Warmed up by the solarizing process during printing, the bullet has a creamy texture that's almost fleshy. In another picture, a brushy bonsai, also writ impossibly large, promises to deliver a delightfully coarse touch. For Sforni, extra-large black-and-white printing makes for heightened sensuality. It takes a healthy dose of ego for an artist to preoccupy herself so steadfastly with the preservation of her work. But with two such strong sets of pictures on view, future health is worth worrying about.