Inside Artist Julian Charrière’s Chic Deep-Sea Expeditions

In 2014, artist Julian Charrière was provided the possibility to go on a diving expedition in Cocos Island, off Costa Rica, as a part of an artwork challenge. The one drawback: He didn’t know learn how to dive. It was March in Berlin, and the one place to get his certification was within the East Berlin lake Müggelsee. The water was freezing chilly, with extraordinarily poor visibility.

5 weeks later, he was on his technique to the distant Pacific island. There, he was dazzled by the sights he witnessed on his evening dives: faculties of hammerheads in a feeding frenzy, gigantic whale sharks, and swooping manta rays. “By way of diving, it’s type of pretty much as good because it will get,” he stated in an interview.

The time Charrière spent underwater throughout and after that journey profoundly influenced his creative profession. Based mostly in Berlin, the Swiss French artist is thought for his images, set up, and video works that middle human relationships to nature, in all its superior, overwhelming glory. The crackling flames of open-pit coal mines, nuclear take a look at websites, and the Arctic Ocean have all supplied backdrops for his spectacular, research-driven follow. These examples, alongside a spread of recent and older work, are at the moment on view on the Museum Tinguely in Basel by November 2nd. Titled “Midnight Zone,” this main new solo present focuses on water and the complicated networks of life that it sustains. The exhibition opened throughout Artwork Basel, the place Charrière’s work was on view at a number of cubicles—indicating an artist on the prime of his recreation.

Charrière grew up in Switzerland, “surrounded by mountains, lakes, glaciers, and rivers,” he stated. But it surely was diving that helped the artist himself change his outlook. The disorienting expertise of being underwater “actually helped me to recalibrate or rethink my relation with my environment on the floor,” he stated. The craziest dive he’s carried out, he stated, was in the course of the Pacific. He dove to 35 meters, the place he “fully misplaced the sense of scale or any type of perceptional reference level.” It was a life-altering expertise.

An identical recalibration occurs to guests within the Museum Tinguely present. Many rooms are shrouded in darkness, the dimmed lights evoking the thriller of the deep sea. A model new work, Albedo (2025), incorporates a practically hour-long underwater video shot from beneath icebergs within the Arctic Ocean with the digital camera pointing upwards. The work is projected onto the ceiling, which means viewers should lie all the way down to see the shimmering halos of blue-tinged daylight refract by the water. The rating consists of vocalizations from orcas, sperm whales, and humpback whales that echo all through the house, creating an eerie surroundings. It’s a topsy-turvy set up that instantly units the stage: Whereas the subaquatic normally feels distant, mysterious, and even scary, right here, it turns into instant and enveloping.

A number of of the works on view have interaction with local weather change and different types of environmental devastation. Spiral Financial system (2025) consists of a ready-made merchandising machine crammed with ammonite fossils. The machine’s metallic corkscrews echo the coiled form of the shells left behind by this now-extinct species. This work critically explores how people have extracted the riches of our planet for industrial use. “There’s this phantasm of infinite sources. On the similar time, we additionally flip all the pieces we contact right into a commodity,” Charrière stated throughout a tour of the present.

The artist has lengthy taken a pointed strategy in his work. One of many oldest works on view, the picture collection “The Blue Fossil Entropic Tales” (2013), paperwork the artist’s travels to Iceland, the place he clambered aboard a huge, sculptural iceberg island with a gas-powered torch. The pictures present the artist, a tiny, black determine, making an attempt in useless to soften these large ice blocks. An absurd gesture when tried by a single individual, it nonetheless evokes the irreversible injury that we inflict by human-caused local weather change.

Whereas such works reply to modern crises, the artist additionally famous the affect of Romanticism, the Nineteenth-century motion that emphasised the elegant energy of nature. The anonymized human silhouette in “The Blue Fossil Entropic Tales” evokes the reverent stance of the topic of Caspar David Friedrich’s Romantic masterpiece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (ca. 1818). However in distinction to Friedrich’s quietly observant determine, Charrière’s modern wanderer is depicted violently however fruitlessly making an attempt to say management over the wild pure components.

Charrière’s concentrate on the surroundings takes a extra meditative tone in more moderen works that contain large-scale interventions deep beneath the ocean. The present takes its title from a significant new fee, The Midnight Zone (2024). Not like the twilight zone, the bottom degree of the ocean that mild can attain, the midnight zone will get no mild in any respect, creating an excessive ecosystem in contrast to many others on Earth. Extending to depths of 4,000 meters, it’s a habitat populated by unusual sea life that scientists nonetheless know little or no about. For this hour-long 4K video work, Charrière dropped a rotating Fresnel lens (the sort utilized in lighthouses) into the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, which lies within the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and Mexico. The digital camera captures animals not often seen by people, from bioluminescent anglerfish to massive sixgill sharks, slowly circling the sunshine.