The Evolving Gesture

Artists take Four Positions on excavating form, states Mario D’ Souza.

- Mario D’ Souza

In Julien Segard’s Dark Was The Night, an opaque blackness envelopes a dimly-lit room. Before we adjust to the black, bright slivers akin to the tricks of the eye or a hallucination draw our attention. Flame-like and golden at its tips, descending and disintegrating, this fantastic ‘explosion’ is spellbinding. This is an effect created by the golden foil that spreads across a charcoal curtain in the room.

These splinters of light could be a shower of meteors hurtling through the atmosphere or a dry branch set ablaze, its embers slowly dissolving into ash. It could also be pyrotechnic on a moonless night or a vision of distant combustion.

Segard’s monumental Dark Was The Night made of charcoal and gold foil on the cloth was part of Four Positions, an anthology of four solo projects featuring works by Ayesha Sultana, Krishna Reddy, Rathin Barman, and Segard. The show was held at Experimenter, Kolkata, from the 22nd of August to the 30th of September.

Light and darkness in Segard’s work are observational. They stretch from the nimbleness of a shadow to the weight of the night sky. Segard harnessed this darkness by venturing into nooks, dead spaces and trespassing into the underbelly; he juxtaposed it against the wideness of the horizon. Dark Was The Night is a departure from distinguishing darkness from light. It, instead, proposes that they are both the same or darkness is disguised as light. In many ways, it represents our realities and fictions. Like a magician’s trick, it holds our rapt attention whilst everything collapses around us. The fantastical flare-up is not possible without and is reliant on the very darkness it sets out to mask.