Villa Livia is situated just north of Rome and belonged to Livia Drusilla, third wife of the emperor Augustus. The triclinium in that villa, an underground room reserved for dining receptions during the hot summers of Rome, was covered with an immersive panorama depicting a garden filled with lush trees and flying birds. What is remarkable in this fresco is that trees from different seasons are all blossoming in the same time: we see an apple and pomegranate trees bearing their autumnal fruits, next which we find a rose bush flowering with its spring roses, then the myrtle and quince of the summer, and in the middle the evergreen pine and laurel surrounded with violets poppies and daisies. We can count sixty-nine species of birds depicted flying around, standing on branches, singing, about to take their flight or land on a branch. The trees and birds are drawn in a realistic way making some consider that the triclinium of Villa Livia represented a kind of catalogue of the roman fauna and flora. It remains that this realism aims at conveying a sense of eternity, an eternal time, a dimension where the process of growth and decay is sublimated in the ever-blossoming trees. For Daniele Genadry, Villa Livia presents us with one of the first forms of chronography, a pictorial practice that aims at capturing time in a still image. She considers that this room condenses in its walls the most intense moments in the life of each of these trees, creating a concentration of blossoming intensities that we can usually only experience in the sequential time of seasons. The conception of time in the frescoes at Villa Livia is not exactly that of pure eternity, an eternity in which we would be able to see the essence of each tree, but rather an eternity consisting of a number of intense moments destined to decay. Contrary to the geometrical rendering of the papyrus, lotus, date tree, or of wheat, that we see in ancient Egyptian art [1], where there is no reference to the passage of time, the realism of Villa Livia, coupled with the collection of the intense moments and the movement of the birds, creates an image of an eternity that consists in the capture of the best moments of the life of a garden. Ideality here is not what opposes reality, the world of essences opposed to the feeling appearances such as in ancient Egyptian depictions, but is rather an ideality built of peaks of present, by appearances at their highest degree of manifestation. In a series of cyanotypes retracing the forms of the trees in Villa Livia, (Eternal time (Villa Livia), Genadry pays homage to this chronographical art.
The French use the word “un instantané” for a snap shot, un instantané being a way to substantiate the instant, to make it durable when it was meant to fade away. One of the most common conceptions of photography is that a photograph captures fleeting instants: selfies, pictures of our last trip, birthday parties, random pictures of scenes that we judge important or worthy of attention, etc. which end up in a photo collection to celebrate and preserve such remarkable moments. In a way, photography, in its everyday use, is a medium that seems to present a remedy against the passage of time, a way to cling to these important moments of our life, before they are forever lost. In her series Fleeting Mountains (instants), Genadry uses risographs as a means to capture random instants, rather than important moments, but to capture these instants while they are fleeting away. The aim of the pictorial manipulation here is to make an image of an instant in the process of its disappearance, to photograph the instant as it is vanishing. Random snapshots taken from a car are rarefied to the point of almost invisibility and give the impression that they are about to vanish. The reversal that Genadry tries to propose here is that of the common use of photography: not as an instantané of a fleeting instant but rather an instantané of the fleetingness of instants.
In Lost Moment (tree), this process is reversed. Genadry takes a picture of what is for her a remarkable tree, a tree brimming with life, a moment destined not to last. In this case she selects a particular view pertaining to a privileged object, the snapshot aimed at preserving such a fleeting singularity. The fact that in this case, the moment is not an any-moment-whatsoever, a random fleeting instant, allows the matching risograph to have another function. With the risograph, The Time that Remains (traces), Genadry doesn’t make an image of the fleetingness of instants, but rather one that redoubles the photographic operation on the photograph itself: if the first photograph captures a privileged moment, the risograph here will then capture the captured moment. Seeing the photograph hung physically in one place then seeing it, as a risograph, in another place, activates the memory of the visitor, and such activation aims at inducing a moment of reflection when recalling the double of the image that is being seen. With these two doubles, Lost Moment (tree) and The Time that Remains (traces), Genadry attempts to capture the time that remains after one tries to capture time, the time that remains after someone attempts to freeze an important moment of one’s life in an image.
If a doubled image allows us to experience what remains of important moments, the screen print series, Between Sidon and Tyr (depth of time), aims at producing an image of random successive instants, such as the view we see while moving in a car from one place to another. The movement of the viewer is combined with the vanishing instants: not only the instants vanish on their own but our movement additionally makes sceneries pass by. In these works, Genadry is not only trying to capture our visual experience while we are in movement, but rather to capture the experience of a moving viewer in space and in time and how this experience is built up in our short-term memory. The treatment proposed should hence be distinguished from, for example, the attempts of certain futurist artists to render movement in a static pictorial medium. The over impressions of Balla, or the deformations of Boccioni, create an image of movement and not the experience of movement captured in an image. For such a capture Genadry uses over impressions to express the depth of time, the accumulation of the past, present and future, the after-images of one perception being overlayed on top of one another. The depth of time is seized, at it’s highest condensation point in the insertion of the rearview as seen in the car mirror, showing the past view fused with the present perception and some of the future ones to come. A moving viewer, like one sitting in a car, sees in fact the scenery moving towards her, a palm tree over there, while at her side, a fleeting bush, and in the rear mirror another tree, or a mountain that she has just seen. This perceptive experience is one of condensing and collecting views extracted from a linear time, some of them magnifying this or that detail, others bringing to stand still the persistent view that has just past by, other blurred views underlining the moving perception. These layered-impressions and other photographic manipulations aim then at rendering our concrete perceptive experience as it unfolds in space-time while we move, similar to Hockney’s Joiners series, but in this case mobilizing our short-term memory, the vanishing of perceptions, rather than the actual ever-present perceptions that correspond to our views on some object. Here the trip along a line rather than the circulation around an object, such as in cubism or in Hockney’s attempts, becomes the privileged field, or object, to be studied, the temporal perspective replacing in this case the spatial one.
The diptych, The Valley (Glow) and Glow (The Valley), shows a picture of a valley on one hand and its overexposed, printed version on the other. The picture is frontal, a kind of orthogonal projection of that place. The enduring present of this mountain seems to last for eternity, the geological time of mountains surpassing that of plants, animals and humans. While looking at a mountain it seems that we always look at it frontally, the size of the mountain being such that it doesn’t allow any perspectival views; the mountain appearing as a mountain only to the one standing at a distance. Mountains impose themselves on a viewer, they fill the line of the horizon, any perspective towards the mountain becomes filled with this massive presence. The experience of looking at a mountain by projecting one’s gaze towards the horizon and then having such a projection blocked by the mountain as an object filling the openness of the horizon is expressed in the printed version of the photograph: the eye is guided through the valley, framed by the slopes, but only encounters a blinding light. As in many of Genadry’s paintings, the white background is transfigured into light, the light of the pictorial and real spaces becoming indistinguishable. The light seems to emanate from the image, an emanation that attracts and absorbs the eye, only to make it bounce back on the naked surface of the paper. The printed image performs, in a sense, what the photograph only represents: the presence of the mountain is conveyed into the apparition of light, the projection towards the horizon opened up by the white surface, and the blockage of the gaze achieved when one sees that they are only looking at the material surface of the medium itself. In this diptych, by presenting the first picture, The Valley (Glow), and its treatment, Glow (The Valley), Genadry attempts to show the atemporal structure involved in the perception of a mountain. The two images are in that sense equivalent, the first showing us what the eye sees, while the second induces the eye to reenact what it was doing when it was seeing what it was seeing. The printed image is in this way a kind of x-ray of the photograph, an x-ray of the actual mechanism of perception underlying the photograph.
The mountain photograph in The dimensions of time (kinetic), synthesizes three temporalities: the first is the everlasting present of the mountain, the second is the fleeting present of the moving bush that we can see in the foreground, and the last, to the right side of the photograph, is the fixed present of a picture taken while standing still. This photomontage attempts to inject a temporal perspective on the ever-orthogonal views pertaining to mountains: first by showing the moving bush as the reference point of a moving viewer: the picture appearing as being taken at a specific instant from a car; and second by anchoring that instant in a fixed point, the same bush captured now by a fixed viewer and inserted on the side of the photograph: this still image standing as the photogram of the moving image. This montage makes it possible for the mountain to be included in a human time, to include the everlasting present in the flow of fleeting instants, the mountain itself being seen now as about to disappear with the disappearing bush, before such disappearance is itself blocked by the photogram just before we exit the picture. The painting, The dimensions of time (photonic), facing the photograph, translates in a luminous language these kinetic effects. First, the effect of persisting presence as such is achieved with a glowing light emanating from the mountain, the pink background of the canvas seeming to glow forward, making the light of the pictorial space and that of the real space indiscernible. Second, the glowing light of the mountain, giving it an apparitional presence, is coupled with the slow light of the valley, where the contrasts are so tenuous that the eye needs to adjust in order to see the motifs and colors. From the valley, the colors and lines appear slowly and are only visible to the patient viewer that stares long enough to mold his eye on the surface. Third, the temporal human perspective introduced by the moving bush is on the other hand treated with a glowing fluorescent stark light, a fast light, that contrasts with the slow light of the valley and the emanating light of the mountain. And finally, the anchor point of the moving image, the fixed photogram on the right side, is treated differently, the pictorial and real spaces here are slightly more distinguishable, the viewer being able to see colors, a plant, some aspects of the valley and the mountain, as representations of some landscape. By opening a tiny window for the eye to project itself in a representational space, then by inducing it to contemplate the emanating light of the mountain, before forcing it to adjust its iris to the tiny contrasts of the valley, and be dazzled by the blurred fluorescent motif of the moving bush, Genadry gives a luminous treatment to the dimensions of time: the future projection in the distant representation, the burned bush that shares the present of the viewer facing the canvas, the eternal glowing light of the mountain, and the slow viewing time of the valley.
What Daniele Genadry tries to make visible in her practice is that time can be constructed through the manipulation of images. Time is image sensitive. Bringing two images together, oversaturating, overlaying, superimposing, or burning, them etc. modifies our experience of time, the manipulation of images becoming a manipulation of time. Chronography is the discipline that we can extract from her practice, a form of art that consists in drawing time. Chronography presents a peculiarity: that of using a still medium to express time, contrary to music or cinema for example. Due to the fact that in chronography the medium is still, unmoving, it calls for a living movement performed by the viewer, be it when the chronograph mobilises her memory, the contraction of her retina, or the move-ments of the eye on the surface. Chronography in this sense is a writing of time with images, lines, colors, and contrasts. Paintings and photographs, paintings coupled to photographs as chronographs, make the time of the apprehension of the image and that of the perception of the object coincide. In contrast to this approach, we can consider Benjamin’s conception of images. For Benjamin, our conscious perception never sees all of what is present to be seen, and therefore seeing, necessitates the use of photographs to overcome such deficiency. For Benjamin, a photograph allows us to see all that we haven’t seen, all of what we have missed when we were supposedly seeing. In Benjamin the time of seeing proper [2], to use Sadek’s expression, occurs after seeing, and the photograph stands as the artifact that makes such a sight possible. With Daniele Genadry’s work, on the other hand, the time of seeing proper and the time of seeing coincide: seeing as such has a temporal structure that molds itself to the objects being seen, a blurred bush for a passing time, a frontal view for an everlasting mountain, a snapshot for a fixed instant, etc. The work on a photograph or in a painting, and often one into the other, aims at reproducing these temporal structures that permeate perception, the image here being literately what allows us to experience anew what we have experienced when we were looking at this or that object. A painting or a photograph for Genadry doesn’t allow us to see what we haven’t seen, but rather to see exactly what we have seen. In that her chronographs do not represent, project, or depict an object or some landscape, they do not reproduce what is being seen but rather the act of seeing while seeing what is being seen.
In wars and zones of conflict, (such as the Lebanese wars), the time of seeing and the time of seeing proper coincide. When threatened by explosions one runs for his life and doesn’t have time to look at a distance, to project or contemplate. At other moments, when hiding in a shelter and hearing nearby bombings, one only holds his breath and waits, feeling each instant pass by as if it could be the last. And when, the next day, one sees the aftermath of violence, everything is seen at once, there is nothing to be seen later: violence presents itself frontally, like a mountain, or the Angel of Death, as Sadek says, violence and death stuff our eyes with seeing [3]. In situations of conflict, we see things as if they are about to disappear but also our visual experience coincides with the urgencies of life: we do not have the luxury of seeing at a distance, nor of taking our time while looking. In such contexts we do not see before or after seeing, the time of seeing is the time where everything that needs to be seen has to be seen. If photography was one of the tools of the dominant colonial powers, a tool that splits the time of seeing in half, dividing the time of the object from the time of its viewing, as we can see in warfare or marketing imagery, chronography on the other hand aims at closing such a gap, because such a gap is what distills domination in an image. Photography and other mechanical visual tools allow one to overview, simulate, preview, inspect, etc. such as in the use of satellite, infrared, or surveillance cameras, in order to be able to control and conquer the object. In such a use of imagery seeing proper always occurs before or after. Rather than adopting this form of seeing, what needs to be shown is that from the depth of violence a form of life can emerge, a strange delicate form, one where time is one and perception molds itself on its object. To craft an image that makes us experience our experience of the world as we have experienced it, instead of making an image that allows us to dominate our object, is a way to decolonize and disrupt the temporality that characterizes such a use of photography. Chronography carries in that sense the decolonization and critique of photography by attempting to reproduce the lived visual experience rather than capturing the visual aspect of things.
[1] On the conception of art as expressing the play between essence and appearance, eternal time and fleeting time, we can refer to the Chap. 14 of Deleuze’s Logic of Sensation. G. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation, Seuil, Les Editions du Seuil, 2002 - Chap. 14.
[2] W. Sadek, The Ruin to Come, Essays Form a Potracted War, Taipei, Motto Books, 2016, pp. 50‑55.
[3] Ibid., p. 62.
Fares Chalabi
Daniele Genadry studied at Dartmouth College, NH and at the Slade School of Art, London. She has participated in residencies at the Cite Internationale des Arts (Paris), Bronx Museum, Anderson Ranch Art Center (USA), Fondazione Ratti (Italy), and Frans Masereel Centrum (Belgium), and was the Abbey Scholar at the British School at Rome (2013–14), a fellow at the Bogliasco Foundation (IT, 2019) and at the Camargo Foundation (2021). Recent exhibitions include: IAIA (NYC), National Museum of Beirut, Biennale Gherdeina (IT), GAMEC (IT), Artist Rooms at Jameel Arts Center, Beirut Art Center, Centre Intermondes, Sharjah Biennial 13, Biennial del Sur, MUCEM, Sursock Museum, SMBA, Bronx Museum and Fondazione Pastificio Cerere. She was a recipient of the 2023–24 Munn Artist Fellowship award in Giverny, FR, and currently lives and works in Paris, France and Beirut, Lebanon.
