Darren Almond, Time will Tell (Installation View), via White Cube

Currently on view at White Cube’s Bermondsey location, artist Darren Almond is presenting a body of new work focusing on the idea of time and how it is articulated through the language of numbers. Drawing attention to the way time can frame, structure and inform our understanding of the world, the artist’s engagement with time and its abstractions in the progression of daily life and the natural world continues his impressively nuanced work in painting and sound.

 

Darren Almond, Time will Tell (Installation View), via White Cube

“While time is a theoretical abstraction it is also a concrete reality within human culture, one that is always rooted in relativity,” reads the artist’s press release, offering a duality from which he Almond explores a range of detailed and precise paintings responding to the idea of numbers as a “true common language.”  His work in the show, using numbers themselves, and the logical systems they imply, as a communicative device, pushes towards a communicative strategy divorced from the subtle political moorings of human language and the frames various words and linguistic structures ultimately imply.

Darren Almond, Time will Tell (Installation View), via White Cube

The pieces depict fragmented digits, each rendered in a utilitarian font that calls to mind the signage of any urban landscape, typically in and around transport hubs.  This sense of utility perhaps underscores Almond’s work in one of its essential elements, the baseline necessity of plainly understood concepts rather than more open-ended interpretations and ideas expressed through words. The compositions become a field of partial forms that appear to float across the surface of the paintings, emerging and disappearing, allowing the viewer’s awareness to drift between the figurative presence of the numbers and a space which opens onto the unconscious.

Darren Almond, Time will Tell (Installation View), via White Cube

Almond’s interest in numbers opens up on a world somewhat divorced from that of the usual conception of the creative brain, relying on hard values instead of fluid expressive forms.  His pieces recall the minimalists, but here, seem somewhat divorced from the idea of pure expression of numbers or positions instead of aestheticized iconographies.  Or perhaps in another framework, Almond’s fractured numbers and broken figures open up an engagement with a world where facts and figures continue to shift and rupture in their shared understanding.

Darren Almond, Time will Tell (Installation View), via White Cube

The show also includes a new sound piece, in which Almond went to the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London to record the working mechanics of the three 18th-century marine timekeepers, designed and built by John Harrison (c.1693-1776). These fully functioning prototypes proved that timekeepers could help mariners determine their longitude at sea and inspired the subsequent development of the marine chronometer. In an ode to John Cage, the recordings are played simultaneously for 4 minutes 33 seconds throughout all the galleries, followed by a period of silence of the same duration, creating a melodic, circadian soundtrack that echoes the overlapping visual iconography explored in the paintings.

Almond’s work is on view through January 20th.

Darren Almond, Time will Tell (Installation View), via White Cube

— D. Creahan

Read more:
Darren Almond at White Cube [Exhibition Site]