Art

Gregory Crewdson
Until May 24
- Recommended
This event has finished
White Cube Mason's Yard, 25-26 Mason's Yard, SW1Y 6BU
Rating:
Untitled from 'Beneath the Roses', 2006 Gregory Crewdson
By Nina Caplan

Posted: Fri Apr 25
‘Why don’t you make a film?’ is a question frequently fielded by US photographer Gregory Crewdson; as far as I know, he has always been too polite to counter it with ‘Why should I bother?’ But these seven-foot images already accomplish what many ambitious films try for: they tell enough of a story to grind our imaginations into gear. They are beautiful, saturated images that work like popcorn, feeding us suspense that only makes us hungrier. We want to know what happened – why is the car speeding away? Can the woman in the house see the girl (her daughter? Her rival? Both?) in the driveway? Why does everyone look so unhappy, especially when they are naked?

Crewdson has been shooting his ‘Beneath The Roses’ series since 2004; they are gorgeous, skilfully lit and full of narrative they refuse to share. A woman, blowsily post-partum, stares at a baby who turns from her on the bed in the classic pose of an uninterested man; a lone male drives off as a woman sits in a restaurant, an older man between them (physically, and perhaps emotionally) beneath a cinema canopy. The film showing? ‘Brief Encounter’, naturally, although Crewdson’s figures are as fundamentally lonely as any denizen of film noir, and the curiosity they arouse turns all viewers into private investigators – I have never seen pictures so avidly scanned. Like the great thriller writers, Crewdson is obsessed with the automobile, but he has stopped the archetypal symbol of American restlessness in its tracks: neither his characters nor his cars will ever get to a better place, unless you count winding up beneath the roses. Now, really – how is a film, with all its banality of motion, supposed to top that?