David Claerbout in conversation with Chus Martínez

Time, one can imagine the artist David Claerbout (*1969) saying, is a state of mind. An artist who has spent decades illustrating the duration of images, he has become best known for his eye-and-mind-bending film projections and installations. These basically stretch and compress time like a rubber band. The result of highly deliberative investigations that begin with the history of images — his work includes drawing, painting, photography, film and computer-generated imagery (CGI) — Claerbout’s pictures seek to unlock a secret inside simple human perception: the unstable nature of time. (Christian Viveros-Fauné.)

With Oil workers (from the Shell company of Nigeria) returning home from work, caught in torrential rain(2013) in the exhibition FUTURE PRESENT the starting point is a  found image that the artist reconstructs using photographic and computer technology to create a new whole. Seeming to suspend all particularities and boundaries of the medium, Claerbout generates spaces in which paradoxical constellations quite self-evidently appear to be reconciled.