DAVID CLAERBOUT | Finissage
This is the last week to see the first solo show in Italy by David Claerbout (b. 1969, Kortrijk, Belgium) arranged at Mart, The Contemporary and Modern Art Museum of Trento and Rovereto, which will run until 13th January 2013. The exhibition, overseen by Saretto Cincinelli, — showing once again the non-expected research activity carried on by the renowned Italian institution — presents an overview of the international Belgian artist, who might still be less recognised in our country but, for sure, deserves to be discovered and appreciated for his unique and personal approach to contemporary art. After abandoning painting to work with film, starting from collecting photography, Claerbout focuses on time, and more precisely, on the three aspects of past, present and future, suspending and unifying them in one surface to evidence the different associations and interpretations of one, single image.
One of the first, and significant works by the artist is Untitled (Single Channel View) (1998-2000), which is the projection on a wide screen of an old b/w picture representing a classroom seen in diagonal, where all the students except one are looking out of the big window, towards a blinding sun; the light coming from outside reflects the shadows of two trees on the background wall. Everything seems to be calm, the guys are totally still and nothing moves as it should be in a picture but, watching closely, it is possible to see the leaves fluctuate slowly, almost imperceptibly, returning the spatio-temporal lag between motion and immobility, and creating a combination of photography and cinema. The proposed image is plausible, but something artificial floors the viewers, who find themselves within a sort of both present and past tense.
Making use of digital techniques, Claerbout goes beyond the codified distinction according to which photography captures an instant, while cinema tells the flows of time. In Long Goodbye (2007), the artist, once again, shows a sole picture, projected without sound, yet here the image is in colour and the movement is more evident. A woman with a tray gets closer, she places the tray on the table and turns her head toward the camera (to us), while the camera distances itself and time dilates. The flow of time is characterised by an incongruous play of lights and shadows – on the house walls –, which generate a sort of accelerated sunset. Here is the paradox between speeding up the time of the surrounded space and slowing down the woman’s gestures. Time-slice draws the attention to something we don’t know, because we cannot see anything more, and nevertheless the details abound, we aren’t able to totally understand what we are looking at.
Opposed dichotomies – movement/stillness, slowdown/acceleration, reality/assemblage of fictitious images – compose imaginaries apparently uninterrupted, which are actually hold through technical artifices. The show, dialoguing with the museum space arranged by the architect Pedro Sousa, sets up a non-narration where everybody looks at something and everyone are observed, but where nothing really seems to happen, a non-event.
Until 6th October 2013, along with David Claerbout, Mart will also present La Magnifica Ossessione (The Magnificent Obsession), an exhibition displaying 2.784 objects of its collection – defined by Cristina Collu, the director: “Self-taught, water-diviner, auto-da-fé of works. Victim or protagonist, recomposed collection, disturbing and provocative, maniacal and fetishist. Obscure object of desire. Secret, sharing, intoxication, celebration. Giddiness of blending” – to celebrate the first ten years of ‘well done’ activity.
