Cloud NOW | 展览作品「大卫·克拉耶博：五彩纸屑」

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the 'confetti' piece

The 'confetti' piece captures a singular moment extracted from what appears to be a   local election in the United States. Thousands of confetti descend from the sky, as  guests start applauding. Set against the backdrop of a neo-classical building, the      falling confetti draws all eyes upwards. The particles, descending delicately like   transparent flower petals, appear as an index of lightness. Through this material, Claerbout, in a quest for remnants of tactility within the digital realm, unites seem- ingly irreconcilable aspects in the physical world: weightlessness and heaviness. At    the heart of the work lies a detail within the scene: the panic reflex of a young  boy. Like a gravitational force, his muted scream counteracts the upward movement and  pulls the objects in the picture back down.

Both the qualities of lightness and weight co-exist in their enduring   opposition, producing a new, third dimension that truly reveals itself over time (as minutes   unfold). For Claerbout digital materiality won't be confined to virtual reality alone; instead, it aspires to permeate numerous aspects of life, altering both optical and    material habits. Consequently, lens-based images are already a part of the  past, making way to be replaced by dark optics.

Courtesy the artist and Esther Schipper, Berlin/Paris/Seoul, ? the artist

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David Claerbout was born in 1969 in Kortrijk, Belgium. He studied at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and at the Rijksakademie of Visual Arts in Amsterdam. He lives and works in Antwerp and Berlin. 

In 2007, David Claerbout was awarded the Will-Grohmann-Preis of the Berlin Akademie der Künste, and in 2010, he received the Peill-Preis of the Günther-Peill-Stiftung. He participated in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program from 2002 to 2003. 

Originally trained in painting and drawing, David Claerbout is known for his works using photography, video, digital technology and sound. His practice revolves around the concepts of temporality and duration, images suspended in a tension between stillness and movement, as well as the experience of dilated time and memory. David Claerbout says that he “sculpts in duration. The definition of duration is different from that of time: duration is not an independent state-like time, but an in-between state.” With his large-scale video-based installations, the artist makes the viewer a part of the work: whether by establishing a connection between the projected images on the screen and the audience, or by creating a spatial relationship between the screen itself and the exhibition space, or simply, by allowing a process by which “a single scene can develop into another by the presence of the spectator and a bit of time.”