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Darren Almond is recreating the interior of a chapel when I arrive at his studio in Norfolk. Specifically, the Sansevero Chapel in Naples, where his new paintings are about to be installed. The works depict the folds and abstract shapes of the rags with which Lucian Freud cleaned his brushes and then threw them on the floor around his easel.
For Almondone of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, the rags suggest “the residue of an artist’s life; “a lifetime studying the light that falls on the flesh.” He photographed them in Freud’s old painting studio and was transfixed by the traces of pigment in their folds and swirls. After enlarging the photographs, he applied his own colors to them in delicate washes, “a veil of paint” that he hopes conveys “the liminal space between life and death.”
That idea will gain special resonance alongside the Chapel’s star attraction: a shroud-wrapped sculpture known as Veiled Christ. Carved by Giuseppe Sanmartino in 1753, the marble masterpiece depicts the son of God taking his last breath. “It’s something extraordinary,” says Almond. “There is a subtle inhalation in the mouth, but what you find yourself looking at is the veil. It is so thin and full of light. Like looking at wet fluff.”
Almond, 53, is of medium height, has an admirable beard and wears a rust-colored corduroy suit. There is a touch of Henry VIII about him, although his voice, which has a touch of his native Wigan, is preternaturally smooth. Six months ago, he decided to take the plunge and move the center of his arts operations from north-west London to an old barn on the outskirts of the Fens in Norfolk. He bought the venue, which has the wide, deep feel of a medieval banquet hall, in 2009 – “the biggest stupid mistake I’ve ever made”.
Watching the shades and hues of rags change over many hours in Freud’s study was familiar to Almond: for one of his early works, Tuesday (1996), had done the same in his London studio, taking a daylight photograph on his wall every minute, for 1,440 minutes. Time has remained a key issue ever since. It’s a feature from his Turner Prize-nominated film. if i had you (2003), which followed her widowed grandmother revisiting her honeymoon location; of Meanwhile (2000), a shipping container rotated by clicking and clicking on a digital clock; and his ongoing series full moonphotographs of significant landscapes (Constable’s Suffolk, Cézanne’s Provence, etc.) taken at night and under moonlight. He points to a photograph showing a faint ray of light across the Ribblehead Viaduct. “That’s one of the last mail trains. I used to get on it when I was a kid and travel all over the country. “They disappeared a long time ago.”
Although the chapel has a strong contemporary art program, it is a considerable achievement to display it in a space so valuable that tourists are prohibited from taking photographs inside. “When Darren shared his concept with us,” says Maria Alessandra Masucci, director of the Sansevero Chapel Museum”, he explained that while working on the rags, he immediately recognized a connection with the baroque aesthetic of the Sansevero Chapel. “I knew what he meant as soon as I saw them.”
Almond tells the Veiled Christ as “one of those experiences that stay deep inside you.” The same thing happened in Freud’s study, he says. “The more times you go around the sun, the more you wonder why you continue to carry those impressions and encounters. It is a question I will spend the rest of my life fighting to answer.”
Over time, Freud’s rags formed large piles that grew until they resembled “the tide of the sea coming in and out,” says Freud’s former assistant, the artist David Dawson. Dawson inherited Freud’s house and studio in Kensington when the portrait painter died in 2011. He is inundated with requests to visit him and turns down most of them, “but I like what Darren does and I felt I would sympathize with it.” When Dawson saw the finished paintings, he told Almond how, when Freud was old and frail, he had turned to him and said: “David, I think my palette is a little like that of British songbirds: tones earthy browns and a sudden burst of color. .” The image delighted Almond so much that he named the paintings in homage: Leptotila Verreauxi (white-tipped dove), for example, and Domestic pin (house sparrow).
Almond was born in Wigan, Greater Manchester, in 1971. “It was magical, the industrial heartland.” He grew up on the outskirts of the city and attributes his new connection to the landscape to the dairyman father of a schoolmate, for whom he washed milk bottles every Sunday. “I can paint an idyllic picture but it was also brutal. There is a forgotten majority in the north who have suffered greatly. There wasn’t a book in our house. I don’t know where the light came from that made me move, other than witnessing the difficulties and thinking, ‘Let’s try to turn this around.’ I had nothing to lose either. I think that’s the most important thing. “I literally had nothing to lose.”
He pulls out a reproduction of the Paddington painting painted by Freud in 1970-72. Vacant land with houses. He first saw it in a book while studying at Wigan Tech. “That image is what made me realize I was moving to London to become an artist. Freud’s penny has been dropping for quite some time.”
He graduated from Winchester School of Art in 1993 and had his first exhibition at White Cube in 1997, joining Jay Jopling’s stellar post-YBA group. The same year he became the youngest artist (at age 26) in Charles Saatchi’s influential group. Sensation exhibition. Today, it moves from one international fair to another: Tokyo, Berlin, San Francisco and Geneva. His most viewed public work is probably the series of three works of art He created for the new Bond Street station, a permanent installation commissioned by the Crossrail Art Program to commemorate the opening of the Elizabeth Line in 2022. The success “was achieved through a lot of hard work,” he says. “Through drive and determination, I remain the same way.”
Later, he talks about his grandfather, who lived next door when he was a child in Wigan. “A wonderful and kind man; a year-round gardener who would have flowers in the front and vegetables in the back on the smallest budget. He liked to do things with his hands and he did things. And I remember that when school had just started I came back very excited. I said, ‘Guess what? Today, all afternoon, we just played.’ And he told me: ‘Playing is the most important way to learn.’ Isn’t it great?
Rags will run until March 17. museosansevero.it. Songbirds and willows until March 8, alfonsoartiaco.com