To Leave a Light Impression - Darren Almond, White Cube Bermondsey

The title of his new show may suggest otherwise, but London-based artist Darren Almond is unlikely to leave a light impression. To Leave A Light Impression at the White Cube Bermondsey brings together examples of his photography and bronze sculpture, giant and brooding landscapes of earth and a tight iconography of the moon.

Almond’s interest in the moon is part of a broader, self-proclaimed passion for geological and mythical: after all it’s probably the moon, even more than the sun, that has had the most momentous significance to human creativity and storytelling. As such, this is very much an upwards-looking set of works. Almond spent thirteen years travelling to every continent to assemble his magnificent photographic series Fullmoon, in which ground-based shots are lit by the light of a full moon, incandescent in long exposure. 

This type of landscape photography is a difficult genre; contending as it does with a formidable Romantic and British tradition of landscape painting. But in Almond, there are poetic touches that reveal the presence of a master behind the camera. One of his most awe-inspiring works is the triptych of the Perito Moreno Glacier in Patagonia – a condensed view of a natural form whose sublime scale Almond balances with elegiac, neo-Romantic touches that grieve for the glacier as it creeps to its splintering, shattering death. Almond leaves us in little doubt that this has been brusquely catalyzed by man-made global warming.

Alongside the photograph collection are twelve bronze columns representing the twelve human beings who have so far made it to the moon for a lunar stroll, weighted relative to their size. If the point of the photographs was to turn an earthly landscape into an other-worldly one, these bronze weights do something like the opposite: reifying mankind’s brushes with the lunar surface into physical, tangible weights which terrestrial gravity permits us to understand.

Almond’s first widely-publicized piece involved a large ceiling fan installed under London’s Westway flyby, and although he has continued to work in installation materials since, To Leave a Light Impression is an intense, compressed, poetic testament to the persistent force of these more traditional media.