XNL is pleased to present in an Italian institution The pure necessity, 2016 by David Claerbout (1969, Kortrijk, Belgium, lives and works in Antwerp).

The work is a 50-minute sound video made with the 2D animation technique in which Claerbout and a team of artists worked painstakingly for three years to redesign the sequences of the famous film The Jungle Book, the 1967 Disney classic directed by Wolfgang Reitherman and based on the 1894 book of the same name by Rudyard Kipling. The artist’s version of the Disney classic transforms the sentimental and comic story of jungle animals dancing, singing and playing the trumpet into a film that “renounces the humanisation” of the animals and even the “man cub”. The animals behave in a manner appropriate to their species, returning with dignity to being bears, panthers and pythons and showing us a different methodology of listening, dialogue and representation of the living. From a film that celebrates the speed, dynamism and efficiency of a (humanised) nature of the violent and cruel that helps the weak until its emancipation and entry into “modern life”, the video speaks to us of slowness, projects us towards another existential dimension and, as often happens in Claerbout’s work, offers itself as a reflection on the conceptual impact of the passage of time and an investigation into the very nature of the cinematographic medium.

A pioneer in research on the moving image, the artist, one of the most acclaimed of his generation, arrived at video through the daily practice of drawing, the necessity of painting and the investigation of photography. This approach to the evolution of art languages as the development of an existential necessity that brings together painting, drawing, photography and the moving image is therefore one of the many reasons for the invitation to the artist to present his work, exhibited in galleries and art museums around the world, at XNL.

A strong motivation was also the reasoning on the identity of the context in which XNL finds its home and the proximity to the Galleria d’Arte Moderna Ricci Oddi and its collection of paintings and photographs and drawings linked precisely to the century of transition between stasis and movement, nature and human beings, introspective portraits and representation of time and ongoing rethinking process about what really separate humans from other forms of life.

Lastly, the work itself also speaks, without needing explanation, of inversions of cultural models, contradictions between animation and immobility, and the celebration of dynamism and laziness as existential conditions that each of us has experienced and continues to experience from our own current lives.

davidclaerbout.com