‘Dark Optics’: David Claerbout’s Unstable Images

David Claerbout b. 1969, Belgium Follow +

At first glance, it could be a frame from a high-definition nature documentary: a stand of trees, light slanting through foliage, smoke rising in delicate, painterly plumes. Look closer and the image insists you look again: the leaves tremble, shadows lengthen, wind animates branches—but the flames are locked, frozen in a single, unresolved instant. This is Wildfire (meditation on fire) (2019–2020), a cameraless CGI scene built in a real-time engine and then arrested at the one element we expect to move.

Shown on monumental LED screens in cold, resonant spaces, like Antwerp’s Saint Nicholas Chapel in 2022 or Passage Sainte-Croix in Nantes last year, the work unsettles both eye and body: viewers instinctively register heat where none exists. It’s a fitting point of entry to the practice of the Belgian artist David Claerbout, who, over the past 25 years, has become one of the most incisive interrogators of what happens when images slow, stop, or slip free of their technological origins. Working between photography, film, simulation, and drawing, Claerbout uses time as both material and subject, asking us to inhabit images rather than simply look at them.

David Claerbout b. 1969, Belgium Follow +

This inquiry is brought into sharp focus in his latest major institutional exhibition, Five Hours, Fifty Days, Fifty Years, running at Konschthal Esch in Luxembourg until 22 February 2026. Bringing together key works from across Claerbout’s career—including Wildfire, Olympia, Birdcage, and The woodcarver and the forest—the exhibition traces the evolution of his thinking around duration, simulation, and the porous boundary between the real and the virtual.

Claerbout’s artistic motivations emerged early. As a young painter and draughtsperson, he found himself drawn not to cinematic movement but to stillness. ‘I had trouble processing the moving image and finding moments of significance within it,’ he reflects over a video call. ‘I was always drawn to the stillness of the photographic image, especially those that were hidden in books and libraries that were calling for my help to get out of there and give them a second life.’ This urge to rescue images from dormancy shaped his earliest works in the late 1990s, when he began gently animating archival photographs. In Ruurlo, Borculoscheweg, 1910 (1997), leaves rustle almost imperceptibly in a rural photograph; in Retrospection (2000), a class portrait subtly shifts as if breathing. These are not spectacles but exercises in temporal excavation, bringing background processes—weather, light, time—into perceptual focus.

Claerbout’s formation as a painter matters here. Born in Kortrijk in 1969, he spent his childhood indoors, drawing, rather than playing outside. Trained at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, he developed a meticulous, procedural approach that would underpin even his most technologically advanced works. Though never a confident speaker in his younger years, he describes language itself as ‘a visual system that has nothing to do with the voice’, a statement that illuminates how his works operate: less as stories than as visual grammars unfolding in time.

His admiration for artists who combine conceptual ambition with procedural rigour was formative. ‘I was highly in admiration of artists like Jeff Wall or Stan Douglas,’ he recalls, ‘by coincidence two Canadian artists but both with complex procedural thinking, who seem to gather so much with so much liberty.’ From the outset, Claerbout’s work has positioned itself within this lineage: conceptually ambitious, technically precise, and deeply concerned with how images structure perception.

Over time, this concern developed into what Claerbout calls ‘photographic madness’: a worry that the camera, once a source of communal material, now generates fragmented, private ‘hallucinations’. ‘I see the day and age in which we live as an age in which these common sources, which were held together by the photographic apparatus, are falling apart,’ he says. ‘Hallucinations cause conspiracy theories. They cause all sorts of breakdowns in what we have in common. And they promote a sense of highly individualistic perception.’

For Claerbout, this is not simply a cultural phenomenon but a neurological one. ‘Up to this day I studied the neurological pathways involved in perception and memory and found to my astonishment that the pathways are actually the same,’ he says. ‘The brain is essentially a prediction machine. We assemble the world in a way which is strikingly similar to the technologies that we develop and that could lead us to mistakenly believe that our organic perception resembles those technologies. But it’s actually the other way around.’ Claerbout’s works make this instability visible, turning images into spaces where the viewer’s perceptual apparatus is forced to do the work.

David Claerbout b. 1969, Belgium Follow +

This philosophical attention to perception is matched by a technical evolution in his work. By the mid-2010s, Claerbout had begun to abandon the lens altogether, moving into CGI and real-time simulation. He even paused his studio practice for nearly a year to research language-based image simulation, understanding it not just as a tool but as a new cultural condition. Olympia (2016–ongoing), a real-time simulation of Berlin’s Olympic Stadium that is programmed to decay over centuries according to live weather data, marked a decisive break with conventional photography.

Claerbout calls this shift ‘dark optics’: a way of making images beyond light. But he never fully embraces the virtual; instead, he approaches it with a tactile sensibility and encourages viewers to do the same. ‘The virtual is an in-between state,’ he maintains. ‘It has never completely left where it came from, and it will never completely arrive where it’s headed. That in turn makes the [viewer] use every sensorial possibility available to the body to populate those images.’

That duality also converges in Birdcage (2023), a film that begins and ends in stillness. It opens with a sequence of nature shots—a tranquil lake framed by willows, bees buzzing in golden sunlight, flowers nodding in a gentle breeze. The scene feels almost too composed, its bucolic calm edged with artifice, as if the world were holding its breath. When the camera pauses on a cluster of roses, a red filter descends, and the illusion begins to slip. From afar, an explosion, suspended in motion, flares before a stately house. As the sound of birdsong fades, the camera begins a slow, hypnotic advance until it enters the suspended fireball itself. What had appeared serene is revealed as a simulation of catastrophe, and at its centre two birds—a thrush and a starling—hang mid-flight, engulfed in flame. Claerbout stages this with the poise of René Magritte’s L’Empire des lumières (1954), where daylight and darkness coexist in impossible balance. Here too, contradiction is sustained: calm and violence, life and image, coexist in the same breath. When the camera finally retreats, returning to the still lake and the re-emergence of birdsong, the world restores its order—but we no longer trust its peace.

The bird has been a recurring motif throughout Claerbout’s career—from Cat and Bird in Peace (1996) to Backwards Growing Tree (2003)—always signalling the boundary between human and non-human temporalities. The pure necessity (2016), in which Claerbout and his team recreated every frame of Disney’s The Jungle Book but stripped away the dialogue and anthropomorphism, is emblematic of his interest in non-human time. What remains of the film are ambient sounds and animal movements: a patient, slow temporality that resists narrative consumption.

Recent projects extend these questions into the terrain of artificial intelligence. The woodcarver and the forest (2025) stages a mythic encounter between human craft and automated generation. A woodcarver labours in a forest composed not of timber but of algorithm: trees and undergrowth generated via AI tools trained on woodland imagery stretch infinitely. Amid this forest, the artist carves wooden spoons by hand—a humble, tactile act—while surrounded by machine-grown simulacra of trees. Claerbout and his team then translate AI outputs back into filmed and drawn sequences, insisting on the human touch even within the proliferating machine world. Claerbout’s attitude to AI balances scepticism with fascination. He likens generative AI images to a dessert made entirely of sugar: visually spectacular, but when you really taste it, it’s found wanting. Yet he also concedes that AI can act as a revealing instrument that ‘fills in a lot of gaps in your unconscious processes’. For Claerbout, AI is not a replacement for human authorship or perception but a tool that exposes what’s ordinarily hidden, an echo of the unseen in the seen.

Claerbout’s critical engagement with technology extends beyond the studio. He is acutely concerned about the epistemic and political consequences of big tech. ‘One thing I’m particularly worried about is the viral strength of conspiracy theories,’ he says. ‘Once you have echo chamber rhetoric, once technology allows this huge spreading, it becomes a very dangerous situation and one we currently have no alternative to counter with.’ His response is not retreat but a call to historical consciousness: ‘I think that is the cry for knowing your history.’

This scepticism extends to the art world itself, which Claerbout sees as often complicit in the very structures it critiques. ‘One of my criticisms of the art world is that they have become a bunch of sheep, going to one biennial after the other, celebrating action in art for climate change. No, they’re not. Hans Ulrich Obrist is on a plane every day.’ He is equally frank about the environmental contradictions in his own work. His large-scale simulations and LED installations are resource-intensive; works like Wildfire stage ecological crisis through energy-heavy means. But he doesn’t seek purity. Instead, his practice lays these tensions bare, asking audiences to dwell within the contradictions rather than gloss over them.

Time remains Claerbout’s primary material. From the barely perceptible tremors of early works to the ecological and even geological durations of later simulations, he has consistently treated time not as a frame but as a medium in itself. His works resist preservation as static objects; he prefers to think of them as ‘small signs to the future’, adaptable gestures to be carried forward. His closing warning is less about technology than about historical vigilance: ‘The danger is always in virtualisation; it’s a question that haunts every generation,’ he says. ‘What modernisation does is it virtualises as much as it can in order to solve problems. But at the same time there is always a risk of discarding organic reality in favour of dehumanisation. So each generation needs to ask itself: where do we stop?’ —[O]

David Claerbout: Five Hours, Fifty Days, Fifty Years is on view at Konschthal Esch in Luxembourg until 22 February 2026.

Main image: David Claerbout, The woodcarver and the forest (2025). Single-channel video projection, colour, stereo sound, ca. 20 hours, and 7 black & white photos. In collaboration with Gaasbeek Castle and Konschthal Esch. Courtesy the artist and galleries Pedro Cera, Annet Gelink, Sean Kelly, Greta Meert, Esther Schipper, Rüdiger Schöttle.