Max Sandfort

“And at that very moment a second intimation came to reinforce the one which had been given to me by the two uneven paving-stones and to exhort me to persevere in my task. A servant, trying unsuccessfully not to make a noise, chanced to knock a spoon against a plate and again that same species of happiness which had come to me from the uneven paving-stones poured into me; the sensation was again of great heat, but entirely different: heat combined with a whiff of smoke and relieved by the cool smell of a forest background; and I recognised that what seemed to me now so delightful was that same row of trees which I had found tedious both to observe and to describe but which I had just now for a moment, in a sort of daze. I seemed to be in the railway carriage again, opening a bottle of beer supposed to be before my eyes, so forcibly had the identical noise of the spoon knocking against the plate given me, until I had had time to remember where I was, the illusion of the noise of the hammer with which a railwayman had done something to a wheel of the train while we stopped near the little wood.” (Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, III, 1982, pp. 900–01).

In Proust’s depiction, the sound of a spoon evokes the metallic noise of works being done on a train, the clink of the cutlery reproducing a past sensation which collapses time in on itself. What emerges as memory is the recurrence of a past experience in all its intensity. Following Henri Bergson, this moment could be understood as an instance of pure memory: The persistence of the past in the duration of consciousness, in which memory is not a copy of what has been, but the renewal of past experiences that persist as a virtual totality in the psychic unconscious.

Max Sandfort’s drawings follow a similar logic. Their uneven surfaces, repeating patterns, and fragmentary openness appear as artifacts of the past, artifacts in which form evokes time as simultaneity and induces the possibility of a past returning back to us in the sensory immediacy of the present.

– Emma Bieck (übersetzt aus dem Deutschen)