Untitled (4T M.D. SM 33 N.29 A)

c-print

signed and dated on recto

Henson gives shape to dreams and nightmares, squalor and opulence, darkness and piercing shafts of light: a world charged with erotic tension, and guarded by the spectre of death. lt is sweeping, and intricate, slow to surrender its detail.¹
In the series “Untitled 1992/93,” Henson stages naked and semi-naked teenagers in a dilapidated industrial landscape – a scrap yard that has been reclaimed by nature. It seems as if satyr- and nymph-like creatures dwell here in a gloomy twilight world. In fact, some of the young people lived on the abandoned site for a long time – a circumstance that lends the scene additional authenticity and density.
Henson's dreamlike pictorial spaces revolve around themes such as adolescence, transition, vulnerability, and the fragile balance between nature and civilization. The junkyard becomes a metaphor for a liminal space – a threshold place where old orders have already collapsed and new ones have not yet taken hold. A place that young people appropriate to create their own secret world.
The scenes radiate intimacy, yet at the same time seem eerie – almost apocalyptic. Tenderness amid decay. Eroticism in the shadow of destruction. Henson's characteristic chiaroscuro effect reinforces this ambivalence: light and darkness do not stand in opposition to each other, but act as equal forces that jointly shape the pictorial narrative.
(Christoph Fuchs, translated by deepL)

Anmerkungen

1
Michael Heyward, “The Photography of Bill Henson” in: Australian Exhibitions Touring Agency Ltd (AETA, Hrsg.), Bill Henson, exh.cat. La Biennale di Venezia, Melbourne 1995, p. 24.