Rivieren and Brandt at Custot Gallery: two ways to manufacture the sublime

ALSERKAL AVENUE · DUBAI

Reading time: 9 min

One artist scaled a fig up to the size of a boulder. The other hired fog machines and drove them to a wildlife sanctuary in Zimbabwe. Two concurrent exhibitions, two entirely different disciplines, and one shared method: both were engineering a specific effect, and both knew exactly which one.

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Custot Gallery Dubai ran two exhibitions alongside each other: Natural Sublime, the Belgian sculptor Arnaud Rivieren‘s first Dubai solo show, from 7 October to 30 December 2021, and The Day May Break, the British photographer Nick Brandt‘s series on people and animals affected by environmental breakdown.

Presented together they make a deliberate pair: monumental stainless steel in one room, large-format photography in the other, both turning on nature. Subject matter is the obvious link, and it is the least interesting thing they share.

The actual link is in Rivieren’s title, and it is not decorative. The sublime is a specific idea with a specific literature, and these two shows take two different routes into it, both deliberately, both by construction.

Burke named the routes in 1757

Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, published in 1757, is the text that separated the sublime from the merely beautiful and, more usefully, itemised what produces it. Beauty, in Burke’s account, is small, smooth, gradual and delicate. The sublime is what exceeds your capacity to take it in.

He listed the sources. Vastness. Obscurity. Power, infinity, magnificence, difficulty. Of obscurity he was explicit: to make anything very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary, because what you cannot see clearly, the mind fills in and enlarges.

That is not literary background. It is a specification, and it has been read as one by artists, architects and set designers for two and a half centuries. Rivieren takes vastness. Brandt takes obscurity. Neither of them found their effect in the world. Both built it.

Rivieren manufactures vastness

Natural Sublime gathered three bodies of work, all in steel, all made with what the gallery accurately described as painstakingly precise industrial technique.

The first is fruit and vegetables, scaled far past life size and executed in highly reflective stainless steel: Tyn, a fig; Karaz, cherries; Felfel, a capsicum; Touffaha Hamra, a red apple, all 2021.

The move is pure Burke. Take an object whose defining quality is that it fits in a hand, is bought by the kilo and is eaten without being looked at, and apply magnitude to it. The subject does not change; the relationship does. At that size the surface irregularities, the set of the stem, the asymmetry that made this fig different from the next fig, all stop being blemishes and become structure. Rivieren keeps them deliberately, so each piece holds the archetype and the individual specimen at once.

The polish is the second decision and it is the sharper one. A convex mirrored surface gathers the entire room and returns it, so the sculpture is never seen against a background; it contains the background. Rivieren has made a claim about this that is worth quoting for its precision: fruit is photosensitive and responds to its surroundings, and a mirrored sculpture likewise sees the person standing in front of it.

The metaphysics holds, and so does the optical fact, and it is a design decision with consequences. Polished convex steel is enormously difficult to light and photograph, it shows every fingerprint, and it makes the work dependent on the room it is in. Nobody chooses that finish for convenience. It is chosen because it removes the possibility of looking at the object from a safe distance, which is precisely the condition the sublime requires.

The Erratics, the Ghaf, and a landform that has never existed here

The second body of work, Erratics, is stones and boulders enlarged in darker, less reflective steel, taking their name from glacial erratics: rocks carried far from their origin by ice and deposited somewhere they do not belong, in a geology that has nothing to do with them.

One of them is called Jebel Jais, after the highest mountain in the United Arab Emirates.

That is a considerably stranger and better decision than it first appears. A glacial erratic is a northern European and North American landform. There have been no glaciers in the Arabian Peninsula to carry anything anywhere. So Rivieren has imported a geological category that has never applied here, applied it to a local mountain, and fabricated it in steel in a city where almost everything, including the sculptor, arrived from somewhere else. An erratic is by definition a thing correctly made and incorrectly located. Made in Dubai, that is not a metaphor anyone has to reach for.

The third body of work is trees: Oak (2020), Ghaf (2021) and Maritime Pine (2021), rendered as spare structures with the foliage stripped away so that, as the gallery put it, the architecture of the tree alone is left.

That phrase is the right one. A tree in section is a cantilever problem: a tapering column resolving wind load through a branching structure whose every fork is a stress decision. Remove the leaves and what remains is legible as engineering rather than as scenery. Including the Ghaf, the national tree of the UAE and the country’s most drought-adapted native species, puts a desert structural solution in the same series as an English oak and a French maritime pine, and invites a comparison that is entirely about how three different climates produced three different answers to the same load case.

Brandt manufactures obscurity

Across the gallery, Brandt took the other route.

The Day May Break was photographed in Zimbabwe and Kenya in late 2020, across five sanctuaries and conservancies, and it places people displaced or impoverished by climate breakdown in the same frame as animals, in fog.

The fog is the entire technical proposition, and the important fact about it is where it was made. Brandt used water-based, non-toxic fog machines on location. It was not added afterwards, it was generated on site, which means every person and animal in these photographs stood in it while the exposure was made, and the light in the frame is light that actually passed through it.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. Fog added in post is an effect applied to an image. Fog generated on location is an atmosphere the subjects were in, and it changes their eyes, their posture and the way light falls on a shoulder. It is a production decision with a logistics cost, taken in preference to a cheaper decision that would have looked broadly similar and been fundamentally different.

Burke would have recognised the reasoning exactly. Remove the background and the mind fills it in. Brandt has described the fog as making the animals almost a dream or a memory of what the people may once have witnessed, and as echoing the suffocating smoke of climate-driven wildfires. All three readings are available at once, and they are available because obscurity is the most generous of Burke’s categories: it works by withholding.

The method depends on the damage

There is one fact underneath Brandt’s series that is harder than anything in the pictures, and it is a production fact rather than a symbolic one.

The animals can appear in a frame with human strangers because they are long-term rescues that cannot be returned to the wild. Poaching, habitat loss and injury brought them into sanctuaries, and sanctuary life habituated them to people. A wild elephant will not stand still beside a person it has never met. These will, because of what was done to them.

So the photograph is only possible because of the thing the photograph is about. That is not a comparison the artist has to draw, and to his credit he does not lean on it. It is simply true, and it sits underneath every image in the series as a condition of its making.

The title carries the same doubled structure. Brandt offers both readings: the day may break and the world may shatter, or the day may break and the dawn still comes. The sentence is engineered to hold two opposite outcomes, which is a considerably more disciplined position than despair.

Both effects were built to a specification

What connects the two rooms is not that both are about nature. It is that both artists identified a psychological effect they wanted, understood the mechanism that produces it, and then built the mechanism.

Rivieren wanted an object that could not be surveyed from a comfortable distance, so he scaled it past the size where that is possible and finished it so that it absorbs the viewer’s own room. Brandt wanted an image where the world falls away behind the subject, so he took fog machines to a sanctuary in Zimbabwe rather than reaching for a slider afterwards.

Neither effect is found. Neither is spontaneous. Both are specified, costed and executed, and in both cases the execution was the expensive option.

That is the design content of these two exhibitions, and it is what makes them worth writing about together rather than separately. An emotional response engineered to a brief is not a lesser thing than one that arrives by accident. Most of them are engineered. It is only unusual to be able to see the drawings.

Two decisions worth dwelling on

Two points, one for each room.

Rivieren’s fruit takes much of its charge from the finish rather than the form. Highly polished stainless steel at large scale is a confident, high-gloss language, and Rivieren aims it at the particular rather than the ideal. The irregularity is what carries the work: the specific stem, the dent, the asymmetry that makes it this fig and no other. The Erratics, in darker and less reflective steel, run the same argument in a lower register, and the two series set each other off.

Brandt works the other way round. The pictures are extremely beautiful, in a considered, tonally controlled, exhibition-scale way, and their subject is degradation and loss. That tension is deliberate, and Brandt has held to it across a long career. His position is a persuasive one: images people want to look at get looked at. The beauty is the mechanism, and it holds a viewer in front of the picture long enough for the subject to land.

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Final thoughts

Two exhibitions running side by side, one in steel and one in silver, and the connection between them is not that both concern nature. It is that both were designed backwards from an intended effect.

Burke worked out the mechanisms in 1757 and wrote them down: vastness, obscurity, power, difficulty. Rivieren picked one and scaled a fig until it stopped being a fig. Brandt picked another and drove fog machines to a Zimbabwean sanctuary rather than adding the atmosphere later at a fraction of the cost.

Both took the expensive route to the same class of response. That is a working method, not a sensibility, and it is the reason these two rooms belonged next to each other.