© Cedric Verhelst
These are not nocturnes as Whistler painted of Battersea Bridge. Whistler memorized the night and reconstructed it in the studio into a dim, misty, darkness: the night as we remember it during the day. These small works, calibrated to smartphone size, are not nocturnes but night-images: not to memory but to the time and light of the night.
First, the darkness of the night became a point, its light scattered, fixed and perceived by the sensitive sensor of the photographic device. Time here is a stonde: a brown misting aura of clouds that moved slowly around the moon becomes fixed, the stars strike their migratory path at the vault. The photograph seizes the night in a moment where it becomes a wrap of light. Then there is the relaxing of time, in the artists’ hands. Scattering color, they rub the gray of the night beyond the point where our seeing fails. A bluish moon, a shimmering patch of stars, the ambiguity of twilight. This is the night as the insomniac sees it: Darkness Visible.
Eleen M. Deprez & Michaël Newall
