ART CITIES:Luxembourg -Darren Almond
Darren Almond works in a variety of media. His diverse subjects deal with abstract ideas of time, space, history and memory and how these concepts relate and intersect. He examines the symbolic and emotional potential of objects, places and situations to produce works that have historical as well as personal resonance. Almond’s work often begins with travel to remote locations that are motivated by specific political, cultural or geographical investigations.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Mudam Luxembourg Archive
Deploying all facets of Darren Almond’s practice: photographs, sculptures, video installation, along with textual works and paintings, “Timescape” his solo exhibition at Mudam Luxembourg, combines motifs that all, in one way or another, concern the inscription of the individual in the world and in the universe. Borrowing its title from a recent series of abstract paintings inspired by representations of the cosmos, the exhibition presents itself to the viewer as a “Temporal landscape”. Each artwork opens onto a singular temporality and together they describe a horizon in which different time scales come into resonance, sensory experience is anchored in geological time, the present confronts infinity, human history encounters cosmic time, the rhythm of life is attuned to the cycles that animate the world. Since “Darren James Almond (Intercity 125)” (1997), Darren Almond has regularly used a form borrowed from the world of the railways, namely the train-plate, undermining the objectivity of this informative sign by investing it with other utterances: names, isolated words or groups of words, and, more rarely, poems or extracts from prose texts. In “Laurentia (core-casting)” (2017), the sensory impressions of the poet and novelist Nan Shepherd when faced with the Cairngorms mountains in Scotland as described in “The Living Mountains”) thus appear on a series of bronze plates. Erected around 5,000 years ago, in a cruciform layout with a central circle, the standing stones of the megalithic site of Callanish, situated on the Isle of Lewis, Scotland, remain an irreducible enigma. Some historians have hypothesised that it is an astronomical observatory, the positions of the Moon aligning with those of the stones at different points in its cycle. This “lunar calendar” would thus be one of the first human constructions intended to quantify the passage of time. The series of photographs entitled “Present Form” (2013) consists of monumental “portraits” of some of these monoliths. The photographic triptych “Present Form Exposed” (2013) presents a detailed view of the Perito Moreno glacier in Argentina. The sublime power of the austral ice imposes itself on the eye through close-up framing and the scale of the prints, which reflect the monumentality and density of this ocean of ice. In 2013, as he photographed the sky in the “light” of a full moon one night in Patagonia, Darren Almond was fascinated by the spectrum of colors that ran through it, inspired by views of the deeper space and eager to materialize the impression felt when faced with this night sky, since 2015 he has produced “Timescape”, paintings that evoke the visible confines of the cosmos. Despite their apparent blackness, these paintings are obtained from numerous layers of different flat colors applied successively on an aluminum support. “All Things Pass” (2012) is a video installation combining several temporalities whose central subject is Chand Baori, an 11th Century stepwell located in Rajasthan. Filmed at different times of the day and night, during rainy and sunny seasons, and on the occasion of an annual festival that is the only date on which local villagers are now allowed access to Chand Baori, the images captured by the artist attempt to make perceptible the continual and ineluctable alternation of natural cycles through the visual prism of this ancient monument. The installation is immersive and accompanied by a composition produced from the performance, by a group of Indian musicians, of a series of ragas related to the rhythms of the day and the seasons.
Info: Curator: Christophe Gallois, Mudam Luxembourg-Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, 3 Park Dräi Eechelen, Luxembourg-Kirchberg, Duration: 11/2-14/5/17, Days & Hours: Thu-Mon 10:00-18:00, www.mudam.lu
