Galleries in Paris

Since the 1970s, Ange Leccia has been lming his everyday life, his travels, his love a airs, and his screens. His media poetics lend the image the role of a material that can be read, for example, in Hertzian waves or the white noise of television. We also talk of “snow” to describe a loss of transmission, when the image is missing, and replaced by a host of light dots. In Ô Superman, PEREZ’s remake of Laurie Anderson’s song (1981), this snow appears in the midst of historical black-and-white images, which intermingle ction and reality. In it we see Grace Kelly and an arrest being made by English policemen, Tron and the Vietnam War. The sequences chosen by Leccia in fact convey a brutal society of control where the presence of military machines is widespread. The images crackle and throb, blur and form contrasting shapes sometimes on the borderline of legibility. A tension is at work here between the desire to lend substance to these representations and their endless passage. In an ambivalent way, the gures pass from the emotionally moving to the moving, as if to better assert the system of visual instability in which we are nowadays awash. This system is that of the “digital reticulation” which Bernard Stiegler spoke so well about, corresponding to an industrial attention capture. Because we are living in the core of an entropic movement in which images are forever moving about without being able to stop, and in which every representation is on the verge of disintegrating from the e ect of this unprecedented accumulation.

So Leccia’s arrangement, where the spotlights tick over to light up concrete, allows us to think of the negentropic path that Stiegler took. Here, the light is the expression of an intensity, an intensity which is caused by the concentration of the gaze. It asserts a power of withdrawal. It lends strength to absence. Faced with the acceleration of our hyper- modern world, the elementary meeting of two opposite elements such as cement and light, mass and immateriality, does not amount to much, needless to say. But it makes it possible to sketch an organization which, unaided, produces a mental energy. It draws an active structure which holds and does not crumble.

Such an approach is to be found, it just so happens, in Anne-Charlotte Finel’s video, Gerridae. This term describes what are more commonly known as water striders or pond skaters. These insects, which belong to the order Hemiptera, are to be found on the surface of aquatic areas, where they move quickly about thanks to their water-resistant (hydrophobic) legs, which create surface tension. By borrowing from scienti c observation, Anne-Charlotte Finel focuses on a group of spiders which communicate through the waves made on the surface of a river or pond. The sequence concerns the vibrating nature of the environment, from the sun’s re ections to the quivering water. Everything is moving, displaying a kind of confusion that is accentuated by the musical turbine composed by Voiski. A similar nervous nature then summons other images in an allusive way, like that of electronic transistors or even that of spacecraft in the midst of stars. It is true that the video is informed by a frenzy whose e ect is to subtly alter the motif and get it to produce a host of fantastic representations. Here again, the aim of the sequence’s simplicity is to stimulate our imagination and increase the number of possible interpretations. In such a way that these multiple bodies open onto a sci- world where symbioses and commutations become synonymous.

It is likewise this quivering world that lies at the heart of the work produced by Jean-Luc Vilmouth, who died too young. In the drawings on view, the ring peculiar to wood is the gure that endlessly recurs, like the mark of a natural growth to be imitated. Filling the sheet of paper takes on the feature of meditative action and gives a glimpse of the dialogue between the human hand and the plant world, based on an obvious principle of a nities. This kind of mimicry presupposes the quest for an egalitarian state of reciprocity. In an age when ecological disasters are undoubtedly on the rise, this attitude may seem utopian or, at the very least, running counter to the Capitalocene, based on the methodical exploitation of sources of natural wealth. In the 1980s, Vilmouth asserted a humble and calm sensibility—the expression of a harmony developed in the relation to those others we call plants and animals.

The piece Sans titre (1979), which shows a hammer hidden in a crack in a wall, which he himself made, can be regarded as a manifesto for this show. It augments tangible reality by proposing a recess in which is enacted the cancellation of the object’s function. This kind of work talks about the virtue of the idleness of art—necessary for not adding to the ordinary bustle of our lives. And as PEREZ says in his song, let us hope that

“Neither snow nor rain nor darkness will stop these messengers from triumphing”.

- Fabien Danesi translated from the French by Simon Pleasance

Photo : Anne-Charlotte Finel, Gerridae, 2020, vidéo HD, musique de Voiski, 4″04′. Crédit Anne-Charlotte Finel. Courtesy de l’artiste et de la galerie Jousse Entreprise, Paris.