A snapshot in time

Jeff Wall uses the latest digital computer technology to create seductively luminous photographic images that are as haunting as the Old Masters. By Iain Gale

This is not a pretty sight. It's only a few minutes since the patrol was ambushed and, as you might expect, no one's looking particularly well. It's true that they are talking to each other - one man is even laughing. The trouble is - they're all dead. Dead Troops Talk (a Vision after an Ambush of a Red Army Patrol, Near Moqor, Afghanistan, Winter 1986), one of the highlights of Jeff Wall's exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, is a huge photographic panorama of ashen-faced Russian soldiers, some missing half their head, others an arm or a leg. One is pointing, in the pose of a profane resurrected Christ, to a hole in his side. It's best described as a cross between Gericault's Raft of the Medusa and The Night of the Living Dead. You might think it's tasteless or merely grotesque, but once you have seen this picture, you are unlikely to forget it. Wall has an uncanny knack of creating images that remain in the mind with the nagging persistence of the most familiar Old Master. This is no coincidence.

Wall, a professor at the University of British Columbia, has a thorough knowledge of art history and is able to invoke its lessons in his own work. Using the latest in digital computer technology, he creates large photographic transparencies, some two by four metres in size, which he then places within the frame of a light-box of the same dimensions, the back-lighting making them glow with a seductive luminosity. These elaborate mises en scene are haunted by the compositional devices and internal pictorial relationships of Poussin and Caravaggio, Titian and Vermeer. They can be divided into two types - the fantastic and the banal. Dead Troops Talk, a remade Baroque history painting, clearly belongs to the former category. Similarly, The Giant, in which a 20ft- tall naked woman in her late sixties stands on the landing of a public library, echoes the erotic fantasy which the Surrealists found in Bosch.

For the more prosaic, and more serious of his works, however, Wall looks principally to the instantaneous realism of Manet, Degas and Caillebotte. A Fight on the Sidewalk - a hard-nosed portrayal of a street brawl between two down-and-outs somewhere on the Upper East Side - would surely satisfy the most stringent requirements of Baudelaire, who in 1845 wrote "that one will be the painter, the true painter, who will know how to wrest from the life of the present its epic aspect, and make us see and understand, through colour and drawing, how great and poetic we are."

It is easy to imagine A Sudden Gust of Wind, Wall's massive, technicolour homage to the Impressionists' mentor Hokusai, hanging on the wall of Zola's study. But these tableaux are much more than photographs cleverly posed to resemble famous works of art.

Compare A Fight on the Sidewalk with Caillebotte's well-known street scene Le Pont de l'Europe, soon to go on view at the Royal Academy. Like Degas, Caillebotte looked to photography as a means of capturing the everyday - using the instant as a way into the reality of the human condition. In Wall's image, the characters seem unnaturally frozen. What we accept on canvas as palpable reality we find hard to credit when translated back into photography. The essential reason is that Wall's scene is entirely bogus. While Caillebotte uses the actual observed incident as a starting point, Wall deliberately poses his figures in a studio setting, before manipulating their relationships with one another through computer-based photo-montage. The result is that, while both pictures possess a sense of tension, Wall's has a brittle artificiality. It is this, however, that informs us that we are looking at "art". Wall has realised that the only way to reinvent a realist art for a society inured to news footage from the front line is to make it unreal.

Wall's works are charged throughout with such ironies. Look, for instance, at Restoration - the huge, double-length magnum opus in which he portrays conservators at work on the Bourbaki Panorama, Castres's huge 19th-century life-sized diorama depicting an army in defeat. Typically of its genre, it links its audience physically with the painted scene via various props - fences, discarded shakos and weapons strewn artfully upon a "hillside" of artificial earth. In Wall's photograph of the diorama, a woman restorer stands in the foreground upon a piece of scaffolding, looking obliquely out of the picture plane. In effect, she has become part of the diorama and helps to draw the viewer into the action. What, Wall asks us, is reality? Where does the one image begin and the other end? At the same time he parodies and questions the post-Renaissance convention of using a pictorial device to locate his audience within the image and also asks us to consider the idea of "restoration". Not only the physical restoration of a huge realist painting, but the possibilities that exist today for the restoration of an apparently outmoded genre of realist picture-making.

Wall knows, of course, that in the late 1990s, after a century of Modernism, painting has to be seen to be something more than mere mimesis. Painting now is about process and mark-making. Wall is aware that anyone engaging in realist figure-painting today will be seen to be making a political statement as much as a work of art. This explains his photography. "The fascination of this technology for me," he declared in 1986, "is that it seems that it alone permits me to make pictures in the traditional way." In fact, he has deliberately realised Clement Greenberg's famous statement of 40 years earlier, that photography could "take over the field that used to belong to genre and history painting".

Within this context, and most specifically in relation to Impressionism, his work begins to take on even more complex ironies. If the photograph mimics a painting and the light-box a stretcher, then the back lighting becomes a sardonic comment on the Impressionists' yearning to capture light. Similarly, the studio-based construction of his work is a critique of the precept that plein-air-ism is necessary for artistic realism.

Wall's real genius, however, lies not in such whimsies but in the way he is able to marry his high intentions with the easy accessibility of his chosen format. All of Wall's work is informed by the modern icons of billboard and cinema screen. Just as, for example, The Giant might suggest fine art sources ranging from the Netherlandish Renaissance to Ernst, so it also speaks to a contemporary audience familiar with King Kong and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. A similar seamlessness creates the B-movie Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe of The Vampires' Picnic, and the sinister blend of David Lynch and Courbet of A Hunting Scene.

It is here, rather than in a tired tradition of domestic figurative painting, in which the uneasiness of Degas quickly became the comfortable complacency of Sickert's Ennui, that Wall unearths the realist inheritance of the Impressionists. In effect, he has taken art back to the 1870s and rapidly brought it forward with a new vitality, circumventing a century of misguided Post-Impressionism. Using the format of a painting, the sharp-focus immediacy of contemporary cinema and the garish vulgarity of advertising, he makes images that our jaundiced, post-modern society finds irresistible. For all his knowingness, Wall simply wants to be for us what Manet was for Baudelaire - the artist of modern life.

n To 5 May. Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 (0171-522 7878)