Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Darren Almond is recreating the interior of a chapel when I arrive at his studio in Norfolk. Specifically, the Cappella Sansevero in Naples, where his new paintings are about to be installed. The works depict the folds and abstract forms of the rags that Lucian Freud wiped his paintbrushes on, then discarded on the floor around his easel. For Almond, one of Britain’s leading contemporary artists, the rags suggest “the residue of an artist’s life; a lifetime spent studying light falling on flesh”. He photographed them in Freud’s old painting studio, and was transfixed by the traces of pigment in their pleats and swirls. Having enlarged the photographs, he applied his own colours to them in delicate washes, “a veiling of paint” that he hopes will convey “the liminal space between life and death”.That idea will gain special resonance next to the Cappella’s star attraction: a shroud-draped sculpture known as the Veiled Christ. Carved by Giuseppe Sanmartino in 1753, the marble masterpiece depicts the son of God taking his last breath. “It’s an extraordinary thing,” says Almond. “There’s this subtle inhalation at the mouth, but what you find yourself looking at is the veil. It’s so thin and full of light. Like looking at wet lint.”The works depict the rags that Lucian Freud wiped his paintbrushes on, then discarded on the floorAlmond, 53, is of medium height with an admirable beard and dressed in a rust-coloured corduroy suit. There is a dash of Henry VIII about him, though his voice, which carries a hint of his native Wigan, is preternaturally soft. Six months ago, he decided to take the plunge and move the centre of his artistic operations from north-west London to an old threshing barn on the edge of the Fens in Norfolk. He bought the place, which has the wide, deep feel of a medieval feasting hall, in 2009 – “the best stupid mistake I ever made”. Watching the tones and shades of the rags change over many hours in Freud’s studio felt familiar to Almond: for one of his earliest works, Tuesday (1996), he had done the same in his London studio, taking a photograph of the daylight on its wall every minute, for 1,440 minutes. Time has remained a key theme since. It’s a feature of his Turner Prize-nominated film If I Had You (2003), which followed his widowed grandmother revisiting the site of her honeymoon; of Meantime (2000), a shipping container turned clicking, clacking digital clock; and his ongoing series Fullmoon, photographs of significant landscapes (Constable’s Suffolk, Cézanne’s Provence and so on) taken at night with lunar light. He points to one photo depicting a faint streak of light across Ribblehead Viaduct. “That’s one of the last mail trains. I used to jump on as a kid and ride around the country. They’re long gone now.”Though the chapel has a robust contemporary art programme, it’s a considerable coup to show in a space so precious that tourists are forbidden from taking photographs inside. “When Darren shared his concept with us,” says Maria Alessandra Masucci, director of the Sansevero Chapel Museum, “he explained that while working on the rags, he immediately recognised a connection with the baroque aesthetics of the Sansevero Chapel. I knew what he meant as soon as I saw them.”Almond counts the Veiled Christ as “one of those experiences that stays deep in you”. It was the same in Freud’s studio, he says. “The more times you go around the sun, the more you wonder why you’re still carrying those impressions and encounters. It’s a question I’ll spend the rest of my life struggling to answer.” What you find yourself looking at is the veil. It’s so thin and full of lightOver time, Freud’s rags formed large piles that grew to resemble “the tide of the sea coming in and out”, says Freud’s former assistant, the artist David Dawson. Dawson inherited Freud’s Kensington house and studio when the portraitist died in 2011. He is inundated with requests to visit it and turns most of them down, “but I like what Darren does and I felt he’d be sympathetic to it”. When Dawson saw the finished paintings, he told Almond how, when Freud was old and frail, he had turned to him and said: “David, I think my palette is a bit like British songbirds: earthy brown tones and a sudden flurry of colour.” The image so delighted Almond that he has named the paintings in tribute – Leptotila Verreauxi (white-tipped dove), for instance, and Passer Domesticus (house sparrow).Almond was born in Wigan, Greater Manchester, in 1971. “It was magical, the industrial heartland.” He grew up on the outskirts of town, and attributes his newfound connection to landscape to a schoolfriend’s dairy-farmer father, for whom he washed milk bottles every Sunday. “I can paint an idyllic picture but it was also brutal. There’s a forgotten majority in the north that have suffered a lot. There wasn’t a book in our house. I don’t know where the light that got me moving came from, apart from being witness to the hardship and thinking, ‘Let’s try and turn this around.’ I also had nothing to lose. I think that’s the biggest thing. I literally had nothing to lose.”He pulls out a reproduction of Freud’s 1970-72 painting of Paddington, Wasteground with Houses. He first saw it in a book while studying at Wigan Tech. “That picture is what made me realise I would move to London to become an artist. The Freud penny has been falling for quite some time.”He graduated from Winchester School of Art in 1993, and had his first exhibition at White Cube in 1997, joining Jay Jopling’s starry post-YBA fold. The same year he became the youngest artist (at 26) in Charles Saatchi’s influential Sensation exhibition. Today, he rolls from one international show to another – Tokyo, Berlin, San Francisco and Geneva. His most-seen public work is probably the series of three artworks he created for the new Bond Street station, a permanent installation commissioned by Crossrail Art Programme to commemorate the opening of the Elizabeth Line in 2022. Success has “come about through a lot of hard work”, he says. “Through drive and being bloody determined, and I’m still the same way.” Later, he talks about his grandfather who lived next door when he was growing up in Wigan. “A wonderful, kind man; a year-round gardener who’d have flowers in the front and vegetables in the back on the smallest of budgets. He liked to do things with his hands and he would make things. And I remember when I had just started school, I went back all excited. I said, ‘Guess what? Today, all afternoon, we just played.’ And he said to me: ‘Playing is the most important way to learn.’ Isn’t that great?” Rags runs until 17 March, museosansevero.it. Songbirds & Willows to 8 March, alfonsoartiaco.com
