David Claerbout

Sean Kelly is delighted to present Dark Optics, a solo exhibition by Belgian artist David Claerbout. The exhibition is the US premiere of Claerbout's two most recent film works, The Close, 2022 and Aircraft (F.A.L.), 2015-2021, alongside a series of works on paper relating to each film.

"The nature of the virtual object, of documentary truth and our access to history have long been key concerns in David Claerbout’s disarming video works, in which complex digital simulation has come to play an increasingly central role. Dark Optics [at Sean Kelly] presents the recent Aircraft (F.A.L.) (2015-2021), in which an impossibly shiny but old-fashioned propellor passenger aircraft (a Douglas DC-4 is this critic’s guess) is found stranded on a wooden scaffold in an empty hangar, a bored security guard guarding it from nobody much. The glossy aircraft is a simulation, presented in neurotic, inert detail, speaking to the disintegration of materiality and our faith in images in the era of deep-fakes, where even twentieth-century optimism of air travel for all is reduced to a virtual collectible. The new The Close (2022), meanwhile, recreates a piece of 1920s documentary film, full of jumps, scratches and speckles, depicting the everyday goings-on in a grimy working-class street somewhere in Europe. Finally focusing on the stilled figure of a little boy, impossibly captured in ‘time-slice’ photography from every angle, The Close offers a sort of redemptive fiction of the photographic image’s access to reality, like a wormhole between our time and a century ago."

- J.J. Charlesworth (ArtReview, April 7, 2022)

The Close oscillates between sensorial cohesion and fragmentation, the familiar and the estranged. Intended as a short, emotional history of the camera, this film reflects on what Claerbout refers to as 'dark optics,' a profound if chaotic recalibration of the beliefs we share regarding image, information, and language.  

David Claerbout recorded Aircraft (Final Assembly Line) with a camera in an empty factory hall, then generated the image of the aircraft with the aid of an elaborate 3D model. The result is a hybrid representation that creates the illusion of a photographic reality.

Throughout his work in virtual photography, Claerbout has discussed the effect of having materials stripped of their context and content which results in the loss of optical confidence.

"Working with synthetic images is operating in an extremely fragmented world where masses of details pretend to be a totality," explains Claerbout, referring to the work of neuropsychologist Iain McGilchrist and his theory of divided attention. "The synthetic image with its overreliance on language and computing has something pathological about it, bringing to mind the fragmented sensorial world of the schizophrenic patient."

Aircraft (F.A.L.) features a brand-new object that looks simultaneously unfinished and redundant. In the same way, the factory hall, a place of production for the future, is interchanged with the museum, where the past is often presented. The only intermediary between this past and the future is the echoing sound of the guard’s footsteps, reminiscent of a museum guard, which punctuate the film.
 

Carbonell, Federica Barrios. "Exhibition Review: David Claerbout's Dark Optics." Musée Magazine, May 19, 2022.

Editors. "Must See" exhibitions. Artforum, May 6, 2022.

Carey, Brainard. "David Claerbout." Yale University Radio, May 2, 2022.

Editors. "Simulations, Ruins and Chinese Goths: Arts and Culture this April." ArtReview, April 8, 2022.