“The sun had not yet risen. The sea was indistinguishable from the sky, except that the sea was slightly creased as if a cloth had wrinkles in it. Gradually as the sky whitened a dark line lay on the horizon dividing the sea from the sky and the grey cloth became barred with thick strokes moving, one after another, beneath the surface, following each other, pursuing each other, perpetually […]
Behind it, too, the sky cleared as if the white sediment there had sunk, or as if the arm of a woman couched beneath the horizon had raised a lamp and flat bars of white, green and yellow, spread across the sky like the blades of a fan. Then she raised her lamp higher and the air seemed to become fibrous and to tear away from the green surface flickering and flaming in red and yellow fibres like the smoky fire that roars from a bonfire. Gradually the fibres of the burning bonfire were fused into one haze, one incandescence which lifted the weight of the woollen grey sky on top of it and turned it to a million atoms of soft blue. The surface of the sea slowly became transparent and lay rippling and sparkling until the dark stripes were almost rubbed out. Slowly the arm that held the lamp raised it higher and then higher until a broad flame became visible; an arc of fire burnt on the rim of the horizon, and all round it the sea blazed gold […]
‘I see a ring,’ said Bernard, ‘hanging above me. It quivers and hangs in a loop of light.’
Excerpt from The Waves, Virginia Woolf.
This brief extract from which the title of the exhibition is borrowed, serves as a wonderful introduction to the world which David Lerones is inviting us to enter. The artist presents us with the gift of a visual diary replete with chance, coincidence and poetry that reflects his own cosmos and that of his immediate surrounding environs.
He presents a series of photographic images coming from his practice of continuous action, always in search of essentiality, contact with origins and with the placid rhythms of nature in contrast with a world full of noise, information overload and a society that is being impoverished at the speed of technology. His work wishes to recover the beauty in the confrontation between the virtual and the natural worlds, evincing the friction that inevitably appears in his everyday life.
The result of a period the artist spent living by the sea, in this project Lerones exhibits landscapes, still lifes of our time with only scant hints of human presence in the traces left behind after passing through these settings, or a small fragment of a portrait that confirms their existence. The large format of some works enables us to submerge ourselves completely in his magnificent objectual poetics and in a moving world with uncertain ambiguities.