33 crucifixions, work in progress, by Dan Skjaeveland, photographer
With 33 Suspensions, published by Nearest Truth Editions, Norwegian artist Dan Skjaeveland has produced a book haunted by disappearance.
33, as in the age of Christ, it is said, when he was sacrificed.
33 Suspensions, like so many ghostly crucifixions, form a series of enigmatic images.
One can try to decipher each photograph, classify it in this or that genre (still life, abstraction, performance), but that is not the most important thing, which is perhaps to understand that the entirety of the scenes of our lives, and the signs that dot them, form the blazon of a perfect existence.
In Dan Skjaeveland's gaze, there is a combination of astonishment and certain assurance, a fearless stupor, a mental tightrope walker.
We move along the ridge of the eyes, finding traces, coherences, hear sub-conversations.
Nathalie Sarraute would evoke tropisms, exteriorized unconscious impulses, mysteries floating in space like quasi-autonomous psychic organizations.
But the Christian reading suits me, as I think of the hour of Golgotha, the instruments of cruelty on the path of Passion, the veil of a woman wiping the holy face of a martyred man-god.
The sovereign void takes multiple forms: there is nothing to decipher, but everything to see, and feel.
As if everything was saved.
Who inhabits these places or territories that Dan Skjaeveland likes to photograph as a sculptor of space?
We see elements of construction, building sites in progress, iron and concrete, but also plastic tarps, desk lamps, bricks and blurred buildings.
A game of superpositions, shades of brown, beige or plaster, earthy enchantments.
33 Suspensions, like suspenses, elliptical narratives, stages.
It brings to mind American conceptual art, unintentional staging, diffuse tensions.
Where is the meaning?
The photographer's melancholy is obvious, provoking stops, discreet tremors, stasis.
We must not separate anything, take this work as a whole, as Clémenceau would have said, delight in its whims (our heads are sometimes turned upside down), welcome it without first interpreting it.
33 Suspensions is thus a spiritual exercise based on God's death and resurrection.
On the spiral and the absurd.
On the present and its props.
On the breath – a recurring motif of ventilation pipes – and breakage.
On gray and glass.
33 Suspensions turns each moment into a stage in an infinite work in progress.
What remains, despite doubts and halted projects, is the impression that the visible is but an immense shroud.
-Fabien Ribery, L’intervalle, 20.11.23