Against The Day

António Júlio Duarte is a master of hinting at propositions between the tyranny of time and the way in which we assume social identity within the landscape. Though the focus of Against the Day (Pierre Von Kleist, 2019) is ostensibly about America and its slow and driving decay and uncertainty, what presents itself, through Duarte’s use of monochrome color is a survey in which you cannot exact a palpable feeling of the linear record i.e. an identifiable chronology. I cannot tell for certain when these images were made. They clearly feature from the last 30-40 years and though I know with certainty they were made in the last decade, the Portuguese artists asks that we suspend belief in the chronologies presented. Most of this is from the considerate cropping that Duarte employs with his medium format (possible Rolleiflex) camera.