I believe it was sunny when I went to see Andreas Albrectsen’s exhibition at C.C.C. in Vesterbro, Copenhagen a couple of weeks ago. I had gone swimming in the morning - a new routine I have caught - or that has caught me - during the current lockdown. Even though the weather was fair, compared to how it can be and mostly is in Denmark by early March, I know we didn’t talk about the weather in its typical sense. Instead, I joined the artist and the gallerist in a conversation about the materialities of the weather forecast and how it relates data, visualisation, and "the weather" as an embodied phenomenon or situation.

C.C.C. excels in minimal and often also quite conceptual shows, and Bella is no exception. The exhibition entails two new works, meticulously hand drawn by Albrectsen: the central piece of the exhibition Untitled (Bella) 2021, a single large-scale pencil drawing that is displayed in the front room of the gallery, and the smaller drawing Untitled (UK Forecast) 2020, which is hung in the back - as a b-side or appendix to the main attraction. Both drawings depict predictions of weather, in Europe and the UK, respectively, but are different both in style and in how the data is abstracted and visualized. Where Untitled (UK Forecast) resembles the visualized forecasts you would normally see on TV with the lands of Britain covered by clip-art-like icons for rain - however in black and white - Untitled (Bella) rather resembles a screengrab of a data-stream.

An exhibition displaying weather forecasts seems timely at a moment when most people have grown unaccustomed to small-talk, whilst simultaneously having gained expertise in talking about predictions of infection curves, risk, and exponential growth as they relate to the day-today experience of lockdown and social distancing. With only a single work in the main gallery space and no accompanying text to contextualize the works (and silence the visitor) one is invited to take another look and to share his/her thoughts.

Untitled (Bella) is based on the data-driven predictions and visualizations of a forecast of wind directions, extracted from the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts at the end of December 2020, when the storm Bella hit the UK and the Netherlands, as well as parts of Norway and France. In the drawing, the expected wind directions, as well as high and low pressures, are represented by thousands of arrows of differing size, effecting a dynamic flow of distributed movements and shifting intensities across the surface. Reaching wind speeds of more than 100 mph and resulting in flooding chaos across the UK, as well as collapses of electricity lines, the storm Bella provided a dramatic backdrop at the turn of a year marked by corona outbreaks, US presidential elections, and the culmination of Brexit, in addition to otherwise typical anticipations tied up with the turning of a calendar year.

The turbulence of the storm, however, is not directly apparent in the work. In effect, there is a clash between the neutrality of Albrectsen’s work with its quiet drama and the images of flooding and wreckage left by the storm. The represented cartography underneath the arrows: Europe, North Africa, a snippet of Russia and the southern tip of Greenland, lies unaffected by the arrows dancing above it. The black and white technique of the pencil drawing only enhances the abstraction. Bella - a perfect storm, not because of her spectacular, sublime fury, but rather in her guise as information, data.

We talk about the tradition of cloud studies in painting and how the metaphor of “the cloud” inevitably echoes any representation of actual clouds and skies to this day. As a view from above, the work turns traditional studies of clouds and skies upside down, reversing the perspective from a phenomenological, or symbolic, to a scientific and abstract one. Instead of displaying what has been referred to as “psycho-meteorological” states of romantic landscape paintings and literature, it has a matter-of-factness leaving it to the viewer to invest sentiment and meaning. It’s the cloud as a form of thinking. Untitled (Bella) in this way expresses the virtual capacity of the forecast in more than one sense: as an abstracted image far removed from the embodied experience of “the weather” on land or at sea, and as the depiction of a simulated future scenario, which may not be identical to the actual weather to come. A virtual storm, a potential storm, not unlike the potential outbreaks, which governments repeatedly warn against.

Looking at the drawing: its grids and shades and all the lively arrows scurrying over the plane, I try to wrap my mind around the relations between representations and predictions of the sky and the technologies and methods employed to produce them. Even though the numerical predictions of today’s weather forecasts, projecting behaviour of clouds, winds and pressures are not cloud-based, they are the result of thorough and complex correlations of data. Inspired by the contrasts between symbolic and scientific approaches, I cannot help but imagine a weather model based on data collected from on-site mobile devices, combining statistical data with idiosyncratic descriptions and reports.

When standing close, one notices that Untitled (Bella) is equipped with not just one, but two grids: the cartographic grid provided by the forecast service, as well as that of the artist, who has divided the image into no less than 128 fields, each measuring 13,5 x 14,5 cm for his translation of the image to paper. That grid is evidence of the labour inherent in the production of the drawing, a trace of a bodily presence and the human factor in the making of the otherwise abstract visualization. In this respect, the work of Albrectsen connects to Lucy Siyao Liu’s A Curriculum on the Fabrication of Clouds (2017-) and Nanna Debois Buhl’s Cloud Behaviour (2018) and On Thunderclouds (2020), similarly drawing attention to the fabrications of forecasting methods and how human computing relates to increasingly complex computing systems and networks.

Thinking of the layers of virtual images behind the perceivable ones, I emerge back into the soft sunlight of the street. Looking up, there are no arrows and no grids in the sky, only a couple of fluffy white clouds. It’s a beautiful, fair day. Bella.