Jarrett Earnest: When the Light Suddenly Dawns
Earnest weaves together images of artwork from Renaissance paintings to contemporary sculpture with moments from his own life, drawn to what he calls the more “permeable” images over “perfect” ones. The photos serve as entry points for the reader — who perhaps may be described more aptly as a witness — to investigate their own boundary that claims to separate art and life.
The written tableaus that accompany his images are made up of laconic observations and retellings, unceremonious but nonetheless suffused with a tenderness that is little too self-aware to be called nostalgia. Earnest transmutes his critic's scholarly logic and precision to navigate the jagged and precarious terrain of self-examination. That self-awareness permeates the work, perhaps inevitably — after all, it is a meta-reflection on these years of Earnest’s life, a retrospection on retrospections, an analysis of the memory of memory.
In one photo, a bouquet of flowers is placed on the grave of the aforementioned philosopher Simone Weil. In another, a lover lies naked on a bed, shot from above, a circle of post-coital dampness still visible on the sheets beside him. In Valid Until Sunset, love and loss, art and sex, and life and death rest shoulder to shoulder, arm in arm, blurring the distinctions between one another, between the past and the present, and between Earnest and ourselves.
The photos “address you in the second person,” he writes, and so does he, narrating in the present tense. Of course, these moments are from the past, not the present, and they are his, not ours – but the central contemplation is a universal one. Valid Until Sunset is a meditation not only on how we see our lives, but how we ‘write’ them through documentation and storymaking, and how we read them, and read them again, and again, and again.
Jarrett Earnest is an artist, writer and curator living in New York City. His books include What It Means To Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (David Zwirner Books, 2018), The Young and Evil: Queer Modernism in New York 1930-1955 (David Zwirner Books 2020), Painting is a Supreme Fiction: Jesse Murry Writings, 1980-1993 (Soberscove, 2021), and Devotion: Today's Future is Tomorrow's Archive (Public, 2022). His writing has appeared regularly in the New York Review of Books, among many exhibition catalogs and other publications.
Valid Until Sunset is available for purchase from MATTE Editions.
