Carol Eisenberg, “Dangerous Beauty” Photo courtesy of the artist/Cove Street Arts

As I took in Carol Eisenberg’s “Dangerous Beauty” series of photographic works at “Abstract Nature,” a show curated by Bruce Brown at Cove Street Arts (through Aug. 24), I remembered an article I read by New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman in 2001. The occasion was an exhibition of black-and-white images by the Brazilian social documentarian and photojournalist Sebastião Salgado. His subject matter has always been a slice of humanity that, Kimmelman pointed out, many of us have spent a lot of time trying “not to notice” – refugees, famine victims, homeless families, boat people and other deeply suffering populations.

Salgado had been criticized for exploiting his subjects by making pictures so elegantly composed and breathlessly beautiful that they glorified these peoples’ suffering. Wrote Kimmelman: “… what causes any image to stick in the mind aside from its shock content, whose impact tends to be brief, are qualities like pictorial integrity and compositional originality, which are fancy terms for beauty.” Though he conceded there were philosophical problems with this approach, he seemed to conclude that if an image’s beauty can stir compassion and conscience in the viewer, it has done what good photojournalism, and good art, should do.

Eisenberg’s subject is the coronavirus, whose colors and shapes she finds aesthetically startling, probably made even more so because of their deadly nature. After reading an article on how past pandemics led to groundbreaking advancements like waste disposal systems and indoor plumbing, she began manipulating downloaded coronavirus images and sprinkling them through lush, digitally created imaginary landscapes. “My intention was to make visible that which is invisible and frightening, thereby rendering it less disturbing, and to suggest something positive might emerge from the current pandemic,” reads her statement.

These ravishing photos, which are developed on metallic photo rag paper in large format (38 inches by 50 5/8 inches), look like the teaming life you might observe through a microscope trained on a petri dish of swamp water – mysterious, edgily alive and utterly fascinating. Eisenberg collages together dragonfly wings, lily pads, plant forms and other elements that overlap and partially recede into the picture plane, all mixing – sometimes seeming to dance – with the virus. The idea that she has transformed something terrifying and morbid into something voluptuous and wondrous triggered the memory of Kimmelman’s review, called, paradoxically, “Can Suffering Be Too Beautiful?” Eisenberg seems to argue that anything can be beautiful depending on your point of view. Which is, of course, a fundamental truth of art. If we can see the virus without its implication – merely as a interesting, vividly colored form – there is beauty in it, too.