David Claerbout. Spring, slowly

Backwards Growing Tree (Colour Sheet for Summer Day), 2023
© Courtesy Studio David Claerbout © Adagp, Paris 2024
Since the 1990s, he has been developing a body of work centred on the passage of time, largely consisting of videos and related drawings, studies, storyboards and dissertations on various projects. Claerbout invites the viewer to explore the plurality of the experience of duration through perception of often miniscule changes. His film Boom (1996), for example, is a slow, attentive observation of a magnificent tree in the countryside. Only the air flowing through its leaves tells us that the image is in motion, prompting us to view it with a demanding yet contemplative eye. The image, simple and beautiful, exerts an unaccustomed fascination by depicting the self-evidence of the tree’s existence in the world.
“To return to the question of time as a construction of space”, the artist states, “I
very much hope that duration – and I regret that some people criticise my films for their slow pace – helps corrode the authoritarian position assumed by the narrator who wants to “direct” the eye. I need to open eyes, and time is my tool for doing so, as it affects the space in which the viewer is located at that particular moment”.
In a quest comparable with Monet’s when he described what he was aiming at in a few words, “I want to paint the air which surrounds the bridge, the house, the boat. The beauty of the air in which these objects are located, and that is nothing short of impossible.” David Claerbout adds that what he wants to do through his work is create an atypical spatiotemporal experience. He states: “I use cinema as an obsolete mode of narration, voiding it of its narrative function and the promises it contains, in order to preserve the features that constitute it in language. I redistribute them. I collaborate a little with that language, I don’t deconstruct it formally, I introduce disjunctions into it in order to invent temporalities”.
The artist currently lives in Antwerp and teaches in Amsterdam at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, where he was once a pupil. His work has been presented in numerous exhibitions, including several monographic events in France: in 2007 at the Centre Pompidou, in 2015 at the Auvergne FRAC in Clermont Ferrand, and in 2018 at the Abattoirs Museum – FRAC Occitanie in Toulouse.
His works have been acquired by numerous institutions around the world, including Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, SFMOMA in San Francisco, De Pont Museum in Tilburg, Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart Berlin, Paris Museum of Modern Art, MMK– Museum für Moderne Kunst and Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Emmanuel Hoffmann Foundation in Basel, Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York.
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