Exhibition preview - Structures For The Unseen: Axel Antas At SPACEX, Exeter until July 12 2008.
A new exhibition at SPACEX, Exeter, features the melancholic and sometimes sublime work of Finnish artist Axel Antas.
Axel Antas: Structures for the Unseen consists of a new body of work including film, large scale drawings and a series of photographs taken in the upper reaches of the Catalan Pyrenees.
These pieces are shown alongside a selection of earlier works from Antas’ intervention series and together they evoke a poetic beauty akin to that found in Romanticism.
The series of photographs depict low lying mist and clouds floating just above the ground and captured in park and woodland landscapes suspended between trees.
On first viewing the images appear to be absurd constructs - which is what they are. Antas artificially created the clouds using a smoke machine to mimic nature and momentarily capture the changed landscape in a single frame.
This notion of manipulating the landscape is continued in the new body of work produced during his residency in the Catalan Pyrenees. Creating structures for birds to live in, he placed a series of fragile bird boxes en masse on mountain tops and other parts of the harsh landscape.
The resulting images are devoid of action, with the solitary bird boxes standing alone in landscapes that are at once beautiful and desolate. The photographs are designed to have a melancholic quality and a poetic stillness that represents man’s failed attempt to converge with the landscape.
A further video work reveals the morning mist gently dispersing over a forest landscape in the Pyrenees. Shot silently, the films evolve in real time and the whiteness of the image makes it difficult at first to witness what is unfolding.
Eventually glimpses of the shrouded landscape and a couple of birds flying over treetops offer a context to the ethereal loneliness evoked by the all-enveloping clouds.
The exhibition concludes with a series of delicate but monumental landscape drawings, which again possess an ephemeral quality when viewed at a distance but become solid forms when viewed up close.
