The real-world dimension of time allows change to happen and allows us to grasp it, regardless of the defined or homogenous environment where it is measured. Time measured out in a variety of ways is a common thread in Rémi Dal Negro’s oeuvre. And so now it is time to pause and take stock of recent developments in Rémi’s work.
Just like with sheet music, there are different ways of putting time on paper depending on how it is expressed. But even then, how time is interpreted can vary depending on who is reading its record. Time is experienced by everyone differently, yet the passage of time is universally described in terms of how it constrains, speeds one along, slows one down, or even paralyses.
The relative dimension of time, which we know to be elastic, is one of Rémi Dal Negro’s preferred fields of artistic exploration.
What truly fascinates in Rémi Dal...Negro’s work is his ability to delve into apertures of time. In many of his works, the time element is fixed between two clearly defined markers: a start and a finish, 0 and 1, a departure and an arrival, a click and another click.
His works represent for example the sound wave emitted by a drum for the duration of a single drumbeat (One Kick n°1, 2015 – One Kick n°2, 2015 – One Kick n°3, 2018), the time it takes a vehicle to complete a journey from A to B (Kweik, 2015), a recording of storms over a season (L’étendoir, 2009-2015 – Primavera, 2015), the force of a silent shockwave from a volcanic or nuclear explosion (A travers le souffle, 2015), the importance of a soundtrack for the duration of a movie (Icare, ou l’inversion du dolby surround, 2016), or in a more recent photographic work, the time elapsed between two clicks of a camera (Lonely South and Marseille Breakdance – 2017).
By plunging into these time apertures, Rémi Dal Negro takes control of their measurement and forges a new way of recording them: finite time with a start and finish but infinite within a measure, itself marked out in sound or visual rhythm and sometimes even both.
A hallmark of his artistic lexicon and necessary for accessing it optimally is the requirement that we shed our corporeal substance as visitors and viewers and attune to his sounds, rhythms and vibrations. These allow us too to enter those apertures of time and to observe the infinite time elapsing therein: an aperture delineated by two instants that comprises an infinity of instants; time that is his, yet time that belongs only to us.
Yet more thrilling again: contemplating these works at a close remove with all the subjectivity that this entails allows us to see in them an attempt by the artist to seize the present.
To experience these suspended moments is to sense the worth of our universally-experienced present, a present that Rémi Dal Negro captures in his oeuvre. His works all describe the fragility of the instant that separates past from future, an instant that perishes as it is born, our present decaying into measured moments of time.
Léo Marin
Entrada actualizada el el 22 nov de 2018
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