THE SUSPENDED MOMENT is a selection of artworks from the H&F Collection presented by Hilde Teerlinck, curator of the exhibition and director of CRAC Alsace (Centre Regional d'Art Contemporain), France, in collaboration with Han Nefkens, owner of the collection. After its presentation in the CRAC Alsace in Altkirch in 2005, the exhibition will travel to MARCO Vigo (its only Spanish venue) and will be taken over the following years to Thailand, Belgium and the Netherlands. This collective exhibition gathers paintings, photographs, videos, installations and sculptures by 20 internationally renowned artists.
On this occasion, the main subject can be easily guessed in the title of the exhibition: The Suspended Moment tells us about tension, about suspense -as in cinema-, but confronts this emotion, this thrill, with the instantaneousness and the transience of the moment, flirting with a similar contradiction as in the title of Eyes Wide Shut, Stanley Kubrick's last film.
"What would happen if we could stop the clock for a moment?" According to the curator, this exhibition offers a unique opportunity to make this happen. All the artists selected seem to have dealt with similar issues. Whether they are painters, photographers or sculptors doesn't really matter. Somewhere in their work we find the preoccupations and views that they share, and they take everyday life as a starting point for a deeper analysis.
It is no coincidence that the work of all these artists is often rooted in a raw, sometimes bitter reality. Victor Boullet shows us the interiors of operating theatres; gruesome moments, with animals in a sleeping/waking condition, between sleep and death. Félix González-Torres' delicate puzzles seem innocent toys at first sight, but they speak of love, loss and the fragility of life. A similar poetic approach can be found in Otto Berchem's installation Deadheading. His dead flowers transform into a real 'still life', whose beauty and tragic end make us think about our ephemeral existence.
Naoya Hatakeyama's series entitled Blast confronts us with violent explosions in a Japanese mine. We see how present-day industry is capable of destroying in one second century-old mountains. With the dust they will construct highways or skyscrapers. We can read these pieces as a meditation on our human condition: we seem to be damned to destroy our past to build a new future. Fabien Rigobert's video shows a car accident. By artificially slowing the action, Rigobert explores subtle changes in the different characters' behaviour, analysing complex emotions like fear, compassion, sadness or horror. Sam Taylor-Wood works in a comparable way. In her video Strings, the dancer Ivan Putrov is literally suspended in the air performing an acrobatic choreography above the heads of a string quartet. The apparent precariousness of the situation provokes a feeling of fascination in the viewer, coupled with the troubling and distressing sensation induced by the fragility and vulnerability of the body.
Gerald Van Der Kaap, author of the back and front cover of the catalogue, is a Dutch multi-media artist. He finds artistic inspiration is his vast archive of photographs, often auto-biographical. As viewers, we are confronted with a kind of virtual "after-image", which nevertheless is able to preserve the original tension.
Some works demand the visitors' immediate participation to "come to life", as Erwin Wurm's installation Hold your breath and think of Spinoza, from the series One-minute sculptures. On this occasion, the visitors of the exhibition are invited to sit down on a pedestal and to meditate by following the instructions of the artist. Diana Thater uses a similar strategy. Her video-installation White is the colour is also interactive and forces the viewer to become an integral part of it by moving in front of the white neon light.
Roni Horn shows a similar obsession as Thater's with the smallest, imperceptible shifts in reality with the precision we could expect from a scientist, but she actually puts the art of looking, the importance of observation and perception on the agenda. Karin Sander's proposals are 1:10 reduced reproductions of human beings or objects. Using a sophisticated 3D scan she can freeze time and create a perfect copy of her models.
Angela Bulloch's tribute to the French conceptual artist Cadère is also based on technology. The changing colours of her light boxes, made either of wood or plastic and capable of generating 16 million colours, are also a perfect reference to the subtle paintings of Prudencio Irazábal (the only Spanish artist in the show) or Bernard Frize. These two artists seem to share a similar interest for the influence of colours on the human mind. Their canvasses are based on minimal, furtive interventions and look like fragile objects that could disappear in an instant.
"A drop of paint on the floor, just short of dry." That is how Thomas Rentmeister likes to define his polyester sculptures. And indeed, they seem to have landed temporarily and not adhere to the floor for long. Smooth and polished, they ask to be touched but seem susceptible to dissolve at any moment. We find a similar sensibility in the photographs of Jörg Sasse. All his pictures are a strange mixture of speed and peace. The landscapes of Hrafnkell Sigurdsson are similar: everything looks quiet and peaceful, until something happens and reveals our vulnerability.
Paul Kooiker's images look like blurred snapshots taken by an amateur photographer. However, they are the result of a precise strategy in order to capture the models in one furtive moment. Jeff Wall's Little Children was originally intended for a Children's Pavilion conceived in co-operation with Dan Graham. At first it looks like portraits taken from an advertisement, but it's only after a closer look that we detect that there are military helicopters up in the nice blue sky. The shape of these light boxes takes us to Dan Graham's work, a piece that invites to meditation by means of three open doors, invisible and transparent during the day but transforming miraculously under the light of the moon at night.
Fleeting snapshots, variations on a same movement, indefinite images, reflections upon ordinary life or the fragility of existence... According to the curator, The Suspended Moment is an exhibition that has to be experienced -as the title suggests.
"It has to be experienced subjectively; it appeals to everyone's personal sensitivity. It consists of fragments and moments that each one of these 20 artists has selected personally, for very particular reasons. I advise you to take your time and pause, if only for 'one minute' to personally discover each individual position. Because... you can't remember what you choose to forget."
