Construction sites reconstructed

While it was under construction, the building was a fascinating three-dimensional sculpture, a tangle of wires and tubes and beams, an abstraction of bright steel and dark voids and blue sky. And it was changing every day. When complete, it would be merely a smooth finished object, changeless and boring.

The architect was Frank Gehry, who was soon to become famous for designing buildings that often do, indeed, look as if they’re still being built. A local example is his Stata Center at MIT of 2004.

I couldn’t help thinking of Gehry when I visited the current exhibit of new work by Daniel Feldman at Boston’s Bromfield Gallery.

Like Gehry, Feldman is in love with the mystery and complexity of construction sites. But he does something new with them. He creates images that are, themselves, the outcome of a process of construction. The result, on the walls of the gallery, are 10 powerful images that leave you wondering - the artist wonders this too - whether they’re photographs or paintings.

Feldman begins with photographs he takes himself. He then modifies them with the computer program Photoshop. Photoshop lets you manipulate photo images in much the same way a painter manipulates oil. You can merge many images into one, you can add or subtract detail, you can alter colors. The final image becomes something you’ve constructed. It’s not something you’ve merely recorded, but it’s also not something you’ve fully invented. It’s somewhere in between, a kind of digital collage.

Lots of artists work with Photoshop today, but Feldman’s approach is his own. He has a day job as vice president for Capital Projects at Brandeis University. As such, he’s constantly involved with construction projects. He’d been a painter and photographer for many years when, a decade ago, he discovered Photoshop. Today he works only with that technique.

For this show, he photographed zillions of images of construction sites, most of them at Brandeis. Then came a long process of mixing and merging. Details are pulled out of one image and added to another. It’s a process almost as free as working with a blank canvas, but it never loses touch with the documentary reality of the photographic original.

The results are disciplined but disturbing. You puzzle over spaces you feel you ought to be able to identify but can’t put a name to. They tend to be dark and endlessly intricate. You’re never quite sure whether what you’re looking at was once really there, or whether it’s a stage set the artist has invented for you. Of course it’s both.

The artist Feldman most reminds me of is Giambattista Piranesi, the 18th-century Roman who created etchings of scenes that he often invented, most notably in the case of imaginary prisons. Both artists love mysterious light from a high unseen source. Both play with spatial complexity and distorted perspective. And like Piranesi, Feldman is fascinated by steep stairs and ladders, with their hint of risky escape.

There are many evidences of human life in these images: a bottle on a stair, a hand-sized smear of paint, but no actual figures. The result is an aching sense of emptiness. Something was here but is gone. Perhaps these are not construction sites at all, but scenes of demolition, abandoned in some disaster.

Feldman’s images are less successful when they tilt too strongly in one direction, becoming either too realistic or too densely abstract. The best ones exist in a no-man’s land where they are forever caught between opposites. They are in tension between abstraction and figuration, between construction and destruction, and between photography and not photography.

For me, Feldman has found a fresh way of looking at architecture and a fresh medium with which to do it. His exhibit remains at the Bromfield Gallery through Feb. 27.

Robert Campbell, the Globe’s architecture critic, can be reached at camglobe@aol.com