David Claerbout (born 1969) was initially trained in painting at the Nationaal Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten in Antwerp. Deeply imbued with the art of painting, his work makes use of photography, video and the digital arts. Employing current image manipulation techniques, he creates hybrid forms, halfway between cinema and photography, which call the beholder’s perception into question and erase the dividing line between reality and fiction, between spontaneity and carefully considered construction.
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”.