20 august 2021, Flor Linckens
Painting with time
This summer, Contour Gallery is not only showing work in Rotterdam, but also in Amsterdam, in Atelier K84 along the Keizersgracht. In the exhibition “Hier leeft de dag” (“Here lives the day”) you can see work by Lars van den Brink (until 28 August). In this solo, the Dutch photographer shows work from two of his series: “Frozen Time” and the newer series “Behind the Day”.
Famous writers like Susan Sontag have taught us that photographs don't show us the truth. Yet Lars van den Brink may have found a way to show us a better truth of a landscape or cityscape, without offering a faithful registration or a snapshot. The mysterious result, in which time and reality become fluid concepts, also contains an element of magical realism.
Frozen Time / Het Singel ( A'dam), 2018.
For his series “Frozen Time”, Van den Brink first experimented with a technique in which he could capture both day and night in a single photograph. He would choose a fixed point to shoot from and would then photograph for hours, from the same perspective. Sometimes as long as 12 or 24 hours. Not necessarily at set times, but rather when something interesting would happen. When a remarkable character appears or when the light changes. At home, Van den Brink analyses the resulting images, sometimes as many as 800 to 1200, for days on end, and then seamlessly merges them together with the help of an image editor, so that the resulting images show both night and day in one photo.
Van den Brink: “It is a summary of time, it provides my work with a documentary character. Then, in creating the image, I filter what passes by me. This way, I paint with time, as it were.”
Behind the Day / Torri de Vajolet, 2020.
For the recent series “Behind the Day”, Van den Brink created a series of sublime and picturesque landscapes that he captured over two years in the French, Swiss and Italian Alps. In an interview in the Trouw newspaper, Van den Brink described the Swiss Alps as comforting and overwhelming. “I find comfort in the fact that I am null and void. My wife did not share that euphoria. She experiences the mountains as oppressive, because you are so enclosed there. I had never thought about that. The rock-hard beauty against the closed-in aspect, the duality of the Alps began to fascinate me.” In this composite of reality/time, Van den Brink manages to capture that complicated duality of the landscape, the beautiful and overwhelming nature that makes us feel so small and insignificant and at the same time, fearful. As a result, his images surpass mere registration.
