British photographer Michael Kenna creates these psalmic images of intense solitude early in the morning or late in the evening using long exposures that in turn exploit the dreamy DeChirico-like stillness at which great black and white photography so vividly and elegaicly excels. Within the tranquility of nature, some decaying vestige of man's presence may be found, quotidien relics of our existence, frayed clauses of a story lost long ago. Another feature of many of Kenna's images is the serial constitution of that relic, either planks of an old dock or the fingers of old piles driven into the sea--a numerology of decay.
We tend to associate serialism with the mathematical clarities of Minimalism. Fine. I love a Carl André sculpture. I hope that you do too. But the pictures of Michael Kenna suggest just as potent a numerology for the uneven and mysterious integers of memory and place.
Like Tàpies perhaps.
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