Abelardo Morell, "Tent-Camera Image on Ground: Rapidly Moving Clouds Over Field, Flatford, England, #1," 2017
In recent years, Cuban-American photographer Abelardo Morell (b. 1948, Havana; lives and works in Boston) has used his signature tent-camera technology to capture the places where leading nineteenth-century landscape painters John Constable (English, 1776–1837) and Claude Monet (French, 1840–1926) made their iconic works. Abelardo Morell: In the Company of Monet and Constable is a solo exhiibtion at The Clark Art Institute (WIlliamstown, MA) that showcases over a dozen of the artist’s large-scale photographs.
Walking in the paths of Constable and Monet to make pictures in their spirit, Morell has traveled to locations in England and France with a tent-camera, a device that allows him to unite in a single photographic image the features of a landscape view with whatever happens to be underfoot—leaves, blades of grass, pebbles, cobblestones, and so on. Combining picturesque vistas with ground-level natural details, Morell’s luscious color photographs reflect on one’s relation to art as well as nature through their complex fusion of the historical and the contemporary, the transitory and the lasting, the pictorial and the photographic.
Walking in the paths of Constable and Monet to make pictures in their spirit, Morell has traveled to locations in England and France with a tent-camera, a device that allows him to unite in a single photographic image the features of a landscape view with whatever happens to be underfoot—leaves, blades of grass, pebbles, cobblestones, and so on. Combining picturesque vistas with ground-level natural details, Morell’s luscious color photographs reflect on one’s relation to art as well as nature through their complex fusion of the historical and the contemporary, the transitory and the lasting, the pictorial and the photographic.
12 August 2024
