Darren AlmondNocturne

Darren Almond, born in 1971, is without doubt one of the outstanding English artists of the present day. It began with his participation in 1997 in the legendary exhibition Sensation, the launch of the Young British Artists, led in 2003 to the pavilion at the Venice Biennale and in 2005 to a nomination for the Turner Prize. Anyone who had the good fortune to see the sensitive and concentrated survey of his work at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen in the summer of 2011 may count themselves lucky. Large-format nocturnes (2004–2010) give the publication, as they did the exhibition, its title Nocturne; they show landscapes photographed by the light of the full moon with long exposure times, evoking in their European variants the landscapes of the Romantics and in their Asian motifs classical Japanese and Chinese landscape painting. The shadowlessness of these images is visible evidence of a time that seems frozen, whose accumulated light does not illuminate the scenes but lies upon the open surfaces like an emanation of the landscape, a fleeting substance. These photographs thus take their place at a peculiar intersection of painting and photography, of perception and imagination. Where the photographic works make time the measure of their perfect coming into being, in the powerful video work Sometimes Still (2010) the artist formulates the experience of time as an endless repetition of gruelling and protracted spiritual exercises. Darren Almond was permitted to follow a novice monk of the Buddhist Tendai school at a run, camera in hand, on a nocturnal long-distance run of 30 kilometres through woodland along the sacred Mount Hiei – an ascetic exercise of the greatest severity, at once physical and spiritual, which the novice has to repeat 1,000 times over a period of seven years. In the course of it he must halt again and again at precisely designated points and recite prayers, which he ends by clapping twice. The distinctive feature of the present publication, which takes the form of a slipcase, lies in the individual treatment of the separate works, sometimes as a leporello, sometimes as a simple booklet. In this way all the exhibited photographs are appropriately reproduced, and the film in particular is given a published form that can be understood as a mirror of the artist’s experiences.

Exhibition:
Villa Merkel, Städtische Galerien der Stadt Esslingen, 29/5 – 21/8/2011