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REVIEWSREVIEWS SZUPER GALLERY BEN NASON
Untitled 3b, from the
series Spare, 2006–7,
fi ne art inkjet print on
Hahnemuhle 308 gsm, 110
x 73 cm, edition of 8.
Courtesy the artist
BEN NASON: SELECTED WORKS,
PHOTOGRAPHS 1999–2006
GALERIE FORET VERTE, PARIS
5 APRIL – 5 MAY
On initial consideration, the two series in this London-born, New York-trained photographer’s fi rst solo exhibition in Europe
look as if they were made by dif_f erent artists. That they are not, and that each is coherent and accomplished on its own terms,
shows an encouraging breadth of stylistic vision. The fi rst, Night Diary (1999–2006), is a collection of mainly uninhabited
outdoor scenes shot in various locations over several years. The second, Spare (2006–7), is a series of single, diptych and
triptych images of promenading humans shot in a sunlit public garden in Paris. The dif_f erence is not just as simple as night
and day. In the lush Night Diary, Brassaï’s dictum ‘To bed at sunrise, getting up at sunset’ is the defi ning formula, except that
Nason’s camera doesn’t slowly expose a human drama hidden within an urban darkness but seeks out unexpected sources of
nocturnal light, almost always rural, and uses these to sculpt or paint a mood. Sheep in a dusk-darkened fi eld, a tarp-covered
boat in a copse of moonlit palms, the pitch-black contour of a horse under a fl uorescent tube in a barn, a fi ery Christ on a
roadside cross lit by curling strips of red tail light – these are as close as we get to subjects in these works. Instead of narrative,
atmosphere prevails. Neither human fi gure nor event is depicted (with one exception, an extreme wide-angle of a spotlit
beach in Tangiers, replete with tiny fi gures and a camel). Instead, the image itself, or rather the light that envelops and
illuminates the image, is the sole occurrence.
In the appropriately titled Spare, the opposite holds true. Here light is fl attened, washed away, and the neutral plane
of a garden’s white gravel ground becomes a theatre, an empty space where found actors, the cropped bodies of passing
men and women barely present in the frame, perform roles as individuals and crowd. Little human dramas abound: a chaotic
scatter of soldiers’ legs out of step; a scrum of business-suit trousers chasing their boss’s trousers; the legs of a young couple
with matching strides and ankle tattoos; a diptych of a woman, her back to the camera and her head cropped out of both
frames, isolated in ever-changing multitudes. Sometimes a fi gure has stopped to adjust a shoe, or to pose for a camera, or
to take a photo of someone else. Beyond this, faceless, stripped to bare minima, they have no more expressive force than
the shadows that trail behind them. Both fi gure and fi eld are robbed of identity – cropped in such a manner that few, if any,
identifying traces remain. The images themselves, blown up large, all mid-tone colours pumped away, further diminish the
details, lending a uniform anonymity to the unfolded spectacle. Ciphers on the upper margins of the frame, walking shadows
drained of particularity, these fl oating signifi ers enter and exit, stage left, stage right, mere players of a tiny yet universal yet
barely visible truth – our hour on the stage, with all its incident strut and fret. Christopher Mooney
one.linfive.lintwo.lin one.linfive.linnine.lin AARRTTREVIEWREVIEW
p147-161 Reviews AR Jun07.indd 13 3/5/07 16:23:17
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