Samuel Laurence Cunnane. Late Spring

About

Late Spring is the latest instalment in a multiyear project made while driving across continental Europe. Cunnane captures moments of idiosyncratic beauty that catch his eye as he passes from place to place, documenting the surfaces and textures of urban and rural locales and the peripheral zones between them: signposts, building sites, midcentury architecture; the tangled woodlands and desolate roadsides that orbit our settlements. There’s a sense that the grandeur of modernity has ebbed away here, been layered over with new, makeshift infrastructures.

A supermarket wall clipped free of its tiles becomes a blank abstract painting; a fence cuts through a French modernist seaside resort – the kind the artist’s grandparents would holiday in; a synthetic curtain flares in the light of a tiny Warsaw hotel room. Minimal in composition, the photographs often feel like the opening shots of films, poised and waiting to be animated. Late Spring also includes several portraits of the artist’s friends in moments of quiet repose. An intimate counterpoint to the transience of life on the road, they capture light falling delicately on the backs of hands, shoulders and necks, illuminating subjects who seem inattentive to the camera’s gaze. These photographs give atmospheric glimpses into their subjects’ lives and yet retain a sense of mystery – moments of meeting and passing in the anachronistic universe Cunnane so adeptly conjures.