The smaller of Gagosian's two venues is the better starting point to take in Thomas Ruff's first solo exhibitions in London for five years, and not for its X-rated material. A quartet of his immodest 'Nudes' are in Mayfair, the gallery windows tastefully fogged over and the handout laminated in case of any accidents. The ladies cavorting and carousing are unmistakably from the arena of porn, but are here given the respectable gloss and blown-up proportions of high art. While the consumption, production and enactment of pornography are notoriously nasty, detached businesses, Ruff suggests – through the addition of an all-over blur – that photography too is at one remove from the grubby act of picture-making nowadays and as irrelevant to porn's process as passion or love.
Onlyunreconstructed space-nerdswill find anything to steam up their glasses at the King's Cross space, where Ruff's hi-res prints of craters and contours found on Mars are joined by vast, pixellated 'Jpeg' works. Yet, in the wake of the 'Nudes' across town, the endlessly engaging surfaces and windswept landscapes of the red planet begin to take on suspiciously fleshy hues and suggestive mounds.
Like his internet-appropriated sex shots, Ruff's recent 'ma.r.s' vistas are largely impersonal, machine-made images, this time surreptitiously manipulated by the artist through digital re-touching or colouring of Nasa originals – an ironic reminder of old photographic techniques such as autochroming and hand-tinting. Astronomy, of course, is a kind of existential porn, a teasing salivation over what might be 'out there', and Ruff, as one of the German triumvirate of lens legends, along with Struth and Gursky, is boldly pushing the frontiers of photography's potentialities further than most.