At the margins of paths
“This stone, once exposed, exerted upon Blake an almost alarming fascination. He could scarcely tear his eyes from it, and as he looked at its glistening surfaces he almost fancied it was transparent, with half-formed worlds of wonder within.”
H.P. Lovecraft
I recall having read somewhere that certain images resist the viewer not because they withhold something, but because they offer too much ; a promise so vast that it cannot help but dissolve at the very moment one attempts to draw near. This is precisely what happens here. From a distance, the image seems to offer itself with an almost quiet certainty : a landscape, a light, something recognisable that calls out, that invites one to advance. But the closer one comes, the less one grasps. What seemed legible dissolves, retreats, withdraws into the matter itself, and one finds oneself confronted with a surface that is warm, dense, closed upon itself, a surface that has not disappeared, but has slipped away from us, as memories slip away when one attempts to fix them too precisely.
There is in this work something that resists fixation, not blur as failure, but blur as condition, as though sharpness had never been anything more than a tacit agreement with the visible, fragile and provisional, an arrangement whose terms one accepts without ever truly believing in them. One thinks, looking at it, of photographic prints left too long in the developing bath, of which Sebald wrote in Austerlitz — those images in which the shadows of reality emerge from nothingness like memories in the middle of the night, darkening again if one tries to hold on to them. It is this same suspended temporality that one senses here, this same way the image has of offering itself and withdrawing in the same movement.
One thinks then, almost inevitably, of Gustave Le Gray : of those seascapes and cloud studies he made in the middle of the nineteenth century, which remain among the strangest and most unsettling in the entire history of photography. Le Gray had understood, before almost all of his contemporaries, that the truth of an image could be born of an acknowledged artifice : his skies were often taken from a separate negative, the exposure time required for the sky being impossible to reconcile with that of the sea, and it was from this very impossibility, from this invisible seam between two moments of the world, that something emerged which resembled less a document than a vision. In his prints, the light did not come from without ; it seemed to seep from the matter itself, like wax heated from within, and the skies he photographed had that particular quality of things that smoulder, that hold within themselves something on the verge of being consumed. It is this same lineage that the work summons, only to displace it, to cool it slightly, to muffle it. Where Le Gray radiated and consumed, here the light is held back. The golds are muted, the dense ambers threaded with deep ochres do not burn : they hold. The landscape is held as if imprisoned in resin — water, sky, vegetation, distant lights — caught in the mass, suspended, living and motionless at once, like those insects that amber has seized for eternity in their unfinished gesture.
This way of allowing time to become encrusted in colour, of allowing an ancient photographic memory to surface within the surface of a contemporary image, produces a strange superposition of times; neither document nor hallucination, something between the two, a layered image inhabited by several eras at once. Not an image that cites the past, but an image that the past continues to work from within, slowly, as moisture works its way through stone.
And the blur, total, completes this dissolution. It dissolves the contours until the landscape — grasses, reflections, distant margins — becomes a single continuous substance, undifferentiated, as though returned to a state prior to form, to a moment before the separation of things. What emerges is not a finished image but an intermediate state, a hesitation of matter between trace and disappearance, between what one sees and what one believes one recognises. Reality returns here like a nocturnal memory, dense at first, then retreating at the very moment one attempts to grasp it, as the light retreats from a day that never came to pass.
What the work offers to be seen is not an object of the world. It is the movement by which the world escapes.
The errors here are not errors. They are the work itself — intentions that only time, or accident, has known how to formulate.