Like a series of pictures eaten away by the years, the The Big Blow (2013) by the Dutchman Maarten Demmink, known as Demiak, brings together a collection of images of historical disasters. Hurricanes, floods, earthquakes: each veduta, in a very small format, presents a destroyed urban landscape in the morbid and stupefied calm of the post-cataclysm. The treatment is especially surprising, as the painting "imitates old photos": stained, moldy or full of holes from humidity, folded, scratched, and yellowed almost to the point of erasure. "The photograph creates distance and an illusion of authenticity", the artist explains. "A painting is considered to be subjective and a photo objective; I wanted to turn this around."
Nitta Yuma Mississippi 1927, Zeeland 1953, Punjab Pakistan 2010: while the titles suggest archival documents, Demiak does not "bear witness," but instead creates a "beyond time." Inspired by historical images (painting, etchings, and especially photography), recent catastrophes are painted like ruined photographs patinated by decades of oblivion, as are others that took place well before the first heliograph, such as Saint Elizabeth's flood in Dordrecht (1421) or the Lisbon earthquake (1755). "The grain, color, and resolution tell us a lot about the period in which a photograph is taken, but I want to dispel this to make each disaster as important as the another. Because there is so much information, we tend to forget what took place as soon as something bigger occurs."
Instead of a passive viewpoint, worn down by the perpetual unfolding that levels everything through indifference, painting requires a slowness that contrasts with the time of technology and information. Contemplation demands time for thought. By imitating the yellowed picture, Demiak produces the same sense of strangeness as when one finds in the attic images of a forgotten forebear about whom we know nothing: the feeling of being face to face with something that is elusive, the hollowness of forgetting. Yet this elusiveness and forgetting are no longer located in a distant past, as they directly affect everything that happens.
Demiak emphasizes the future of societies saturated by images and information, which no longer have the time to hierarchize or assimilate, and to thereby constitute a memory. He speaks of this future-foreign-to-oneself that is everyone's lot. And of a world-ours-in which the catastrophe from three years ago is as distant in spirit as the one from three centuries ago. The tragedy of a techno-logical world working to dispossess and abolish memory, the depth of time.
