IN SEARCH OF LOST TIME

2009 / DAVID KRUT PROJECTS / JOHANNESBURG

In Search of Lost Time features a long line of immaculately and identically framed drawings, paintings, mezzotints and monotypes that run, like a train track, along one wall of the gallery, each image precisely contained within a format that recalls the memento-like quality of a Polaroid photograph. Walking along this ‘track’ from image to image echoes the experience of gazing out of a train window at the changing view. The finely rendered prints track the artist’s recollection of a recent train journey from Cape Town to Johannesburg , but just as the journey becomes more metaphysical, the images start to rise up from the dark bed of memory as much as from the landscape itself.

Alexandra Dodd, In Search of Lost Time, SA Art Times, 2009

FULL TEXT & REVIEWS https://www.alexandra-ross.com/press-1/in-search-of-lost-time-2009

In Search of Lost Time, 2021, video, 00:53

"Finely wrought images, these operated like film stills, not necessarily consecutive but certainly suggestive of a narrative, albeit a tantalizingly fragmented one. [...] The darkened interior of the carriage compartment echoes the chamber noir of a camera, into which the world's light and experience flood." Excerpt from Michael Smith's review in Artthrob, July 2009

This short film is a journey through the drawings, etchings, monotypes, and mezzotints from my solo exhibition, In Search of Lost Time (2009). It begins on a train and ends in a train of thought, unfolding as a narrative of a 24-hour long train journey across South Africa from Cape Town to Johannesburg that I took in a shared, 2nd class compartment with my brother; the innumerable train and underground trips I took while living in London (1999-2002); and the peculiarly cinematic way that train journeys have of unfurling over time and space. But it also traverses the intangible landscapes of memory and mind. The fleeting glimpses of the world outside the shadowy interior, briefly illuminated in the small sash window, may be either real or imaginary. Likewise, the works themselves, made from photographs and presented as imitation Polaroids, hover in the indeterminate gap between reality and illusion, fact and fiction. As the train journeys onward, passing real people and places, the traveler journeys inward and backward, recalling and inventing others.

Sound Design: "Together in Silence" (1997) Saafi Brothers / "Serenade" (1826) Franz Shubert / "Stimela" (1974) by the late, great Hugh Masekela. Stimela is the goosebump-inducing, utterly masterful, and moving recreation of the sound and emotions that the coal trains had for the migrant labourers that were brought to work "deep, deep, deep down in the belly of the earth" in the gold and coal mines of Johannesburg.