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Rather than employ illustrations to launch sequential narratives, Claerbout’s handmade images give pause to what is, at bottom, a profoundly reflective process. Not storyboards in any conventional sense, his highly detailed sketches serve an essential stocktaking function. Though Claerbout has never previously exhibited his drawings, these works have become fundamental to the artist’s layered working method.

Partly in an effort to ground what appear to be airy metaphysical discussions, Claerbout has also relied substantially on drawings-art making’s most elementary kind of images. An artist who eschews realist Newtonian physics where things occur in sequence, Claerbout has learned to craft visual riddles that take as their starting point Henri Bergson’s idea of duration: inner time as experienced by individual subjects. Trained as a draftsman, a lithographer, and a painter, Claerbout first became interested in exploring the idea of time through his investigations of painting as tableaux-a medium he has referred to fittingly as “an old kind of cinema.” Those explorations were subsequently followed by the artist’s study of the essential properties of still and moving images. Like a latter-day Muybridge, Claerbout’s pictures freeze movement yet the Belgian artist also imbues still images with glacial change-while underscoring the uncanny effects this kind of dreaminess engenders. On observing this perceptual gap, the artist has conspired to make existential time visible. Mining the space between direct experience and the parallel universe of picture-making technologies, Claerbout has explored frozen moments throughout his oeuvre that, in his words, establish the existence of a “third kind of material” that lives “in your head.” This “material,” according to Claerbout, is located somewhere between phenomena the eyes can see and occurrences the mind can’t grasp without machines. 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. These basically stretch and compress time like a rubber band. 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. Time, one can imagine the artist David Claerbout saying, is a state of mind.

With an essay by Christian Viveros-Fauné', Hatje Cantz Verlag/Sean Kelly Gallery, 2015, ill. McMonagle, Christine/Sean Kelly Gallery (eds.), 'David Claerbout. Drawing Time: On David Claerbout’s Notations of Presence