Seeing Jeff Wall’s lightboxes in person can be an overwhelming experience. Much like encountering Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch for the first time, nothing quite prepares you for their monumental scale. Wall’s works shock you not only with their size, but through the brilliant intensity of their colours and the sharpness of their details. At Wall’s new exhibition at MAAT in Lisbon, this experience is visceral, seeing worlds upon worlds. Subtle details meticulously placed, and settings designed to thrill. 

Take, for example, one of Wall’s most famous images, Insomnia (1994), showing a distressed man laying underneath the table in a starkly lit kitchen. Yes, the scale is surprising, it’s over two metres in length and about one and a half high, but your eyes quickly move away from the semi-prostrate figure on the floor. Instead, you become consumed by the contents of the cupboards and the dishes on the drying rack. You can see the individual crumbs on the table.

The MAAT exhibition, which is titled Time Stands Still and was curated by Sérgio Mah, is Wall’s first solo exhibition in Portugal and one of his largest to date. Bringing together over 60 works from the years 1980 to 2023, it takes over the entirety of the museum. And what a museum it is — opened in 2016, the Amanda Levete-designed building floats like a stingray on the banks of the River Tagus in Lisbon’s Belém district. 

Inside, Wall’s works – a mix of his lightboxes and inkjet prints – take up every available wall. Although he has famously refused to assign narratives to his oeuvre (Wall has never produced, for example, a photobook. Nor does he work in “series”, every work is completely individual), there is a method to which of his works go where on the walls. A work with a tree in it will be next to another work featuring a tree, a muscle-y guy is next to another muscle-y guy. The connections are very loose and often funny. At the private view, Wall commented that setting up an exhibition on MAAT’s white walls made him realise the decorative qualities of his works. “I think pictorial art is decorative,” he tells me when I ask to explain that idea further. “And it’s sort of gotten a bad reputation because of the idea that art has to be very serious. There’s no contradiction between being serious artistically and being decorative.”

“There’s no contradiction between being serious artistically and being decorative.”

It was when his images were being hung around MAAT’s Guggenheim-like central oval that this new context came to him. “Oh, this is like a grand decoration of this oval. And that’s a very nice and unusual role for my pictures to play. I think of each room in these kinds of exhibitions as a sort of flower arrangement. Those four flowers in that particular vase – they look good together. I think that aspect of it is not simple and not unserious. It’s actually at the core of why we even like art.”

For those unfamiliar with Wall’s aesthetic, his most recognisable works often depict large groups arranged in tableau-like scenes, as well as moments that appear candid but are anything but. Though his images frequently show urban settings, Wall is not a street photographer. Instead, his works are carefully reconstructed from memories of scenes he has witnessed, using paid participants to restage the events in meticulous detail. While his method might be described as “staged photography,” Wall himself rejects that label. He instead adopts the language of cinema, referring to his works as “cinematography” and his images as “adaptations.”

Since he takes such a cinematic approach to still photography, I wondered why he never became a filmmaker. “I did for a while in the 70s but it was very haphazard and I knew I was no filmmaker.” I wonder did these early experiments in film influence his photography to come? “I was very interested in a lot of different new cinema of the 70s and 80s, which was pretty exciting at the time. I learned pretty quickly that it wasn’t me, but I got things from it. For example, the idea of the writing of the image. Everything in the cinema is written. Once there’s a scenario, the whole thing is written, and then it emerges from the writing.”

Wall is a remarkably literate artist. Although he works exclusively with images, he frequently speaks about writing when discussing his practice. Much of his work draws on personal memory, naturally inviting comparisons to Marcel Proust. When I asked Wall whether he had read À la recherche du temps perdu, Proust’s monumental seven-volume novel often hailed as one of the greatest ever written, he replied that not only had he read it, he had done so three times. “Well,” he said in total deadpan, “at my age, it’s not so unusual to have read certain books three times.”

“I think pictorial art is decorative”

“I’ve always been a novel reader,” he continues. “The novel is a very important thing to me. But, you know, I think all pictorial art is literary because it deals with the engagement and the suspension of narrative. I’ve done four pictures based on scenes from novels, three of them are in this show. Literature is always there. It just takes different absences, let’s put it that way. It’s more absent than present, but its absence is the nature of its relationship. I have to silence anything narrative in order to make a picture.”

Time Stands Still affirms Wall’s position as a pivotal figure in contemporary art. Walking through the decades, from the lightboxes to the prints, you get an opportunity to really grapple with Wall’s practice, which exists in the intersection between photography, painting, and cinema. Though he resists philosophical interpretation of his work (“When I finish a picture I’m never interested in what it means. I just like the way they look.”), he is arguably one of our greatest interpreters of ambiguity. What is fact and what is fiction in Wall’s works? He will always leave you guessing.

Jeff Wall: Time Stands Still runs at MAAT, Lisbon until September 1st