Martin Bethenod

To create An American Landscape, Bublex digitally redrew scenes from First Blood, faithfully recreating camera movements and cuts while eliminating all human presence. In removing the actors from this quintessential action movie, Bublex lets the scenery engulf the original Panavision widescreen format and emerge as the film’s true American hero. The forty-minute animation moves between majestic snowcapped mountains, an archetypal Main Street, lakeside cabins festooned with hanging laundry, and dirt roads winding through birch tree forests. An original score, including ambient bird chirps and rustling leaves, accentuates the intrinsic drama of the landscape itself in all its alternately idyllic, nostalgic and menacing glory.

A selection of framed stills from An American Landscape highlights compositional similarities between certain backdrops in First Blood and works by nineteenth and twentieth century American landscape painters. Spectacular mountain vistas recall the expansive majesty captured in the Hudson River School paintings of the White Mountains, while more focused vignettes depicting a small coppice and an empty gas station evoke the melancholic musings of American regionalists like Charles Burchfield and Edward Hopper. Nightscapes featuring glowing neon lights bring to mind Robert Cottingham’s fascination with signage and other urban Americana. Even the most abstract of the stills, which is based on a scene in the movie where street lights begin to flicker out because of a blackout, harkens back to some of Georgia O’Keefe’s most sublime urban nocturnes. By reframing First Blood within an art historical context, Bublex points out that the true marvel of the American landscape is that it owes just as much to cultural construction as it does to natural phenomena.

Mara Hoberman

Brittany, 1940 – date written on a document found more than ten years ago by the artist, after the death of an old aunt, alongside a 1925 Kodak box filled with negatives. It sounds like the beginning of an old black and white film. It’s a family story, marked by lies and things left unsaid, with a quisling grandfather as the main character.

First World War: the grandfather enters the minor seminary and turns to religion – his mind filled with a strict, counter-revolutionary morality. Between the wars: he sympathizes with the Breton far right movement, his mind intoxicated by fascist ideology. 1940: he peddles wine to the Nazis and becomes an official supplier for the Feldkommandantur of Morbihan. This marks the end of the seminary and the beginning of collaboration with the enemy. A fiction has been created from a reality discovered years later, that of a man Erwan Venn never knew. The artist takes the old negatives from the Kodak box, and with them the buried memories of this same grandfather, of his relatives, his pleasures, his daily life: loving, playing, believing, travelling; things that are, all in all, quite typical of family albums that we love to rediscover. From these originals, he keeps everything but the essential element of the portrait: erasing the bodies and faces, as if to perforate the image and reveal the secret of that collaboration. Not a look nor a word to express oneself, the development of extreme ideologies has deprived this period of thought and personality: Headless.

Erasing the faces and bodies from the archive images reveals, more generally, the process of indoctrination that suppresses all forms of difference and singularity. It is also, on the artist’s part, a violent and vindictive gesture, an act of rejection of a legacy he refuses, without forgiving it.
Erwan Venn’s retouching is like brownish stains that remain on old white shirts. These stains are so pervasive and aggressive that they end up eating away at the fabric and boring a hole through it. A pair of shoes, some swimsuits, a wedding dress, a cross, or a porcelain doll remain. The doll is the only face left in these photographs. Its eyes do not lie – perhaps that is why they are still there – they have nothing to hide, nothing to report either, as if everything had already been said.

The rest becomes ghostly, non-existent.

The artist may have erased part of his archives; these images nevertheless make it possible to fill in a « memory hole », to dig beyond a family archaeology, a passage through a national and collective History that is still punctuated by the unsaid. Erwan Venn’s headless and bodiless characters are the ghosts of a collective memory that is still too often fading.
From the same archives, Erwan Venn draws portraits of children with troubled, sometimes lost, almost aggressive eyes: Petits Bretons. These strange, white eyes, with their small, floating pupils in a void left by the iris, directly echo the Village of the Damned and the frightening, chilling atmosphere that prevails there.

Agate Bortolussi

I have a project, Retroactive Interference born of this strange feeling, shared by many of us, of being in a movie. This unique moment that we are living has transformed our vision of the world, or rather has blurred it. Fiction and reality seem to merge to become what you might be called “realiction.” So, I am going back to my roots of my first great artistic traumas. I want to talk about the films that marked me as a child and teenager. It’s not just about masterpieces – some are even proven z-grade series. But these films are at the origin of my universe, of my psyche… Their common denominator? They are genre movies. Horror, violence, action, science fiction, apocalypse… to sum up quickly.My childish spirit still untouched by references, ingested everything with a limitless appetite. Later, of course, I evolved in my tastes, but I never forgot that primitive joy felt in the darkness of a movie theater or in front of an often-viewed videotape.I have kept intact in me the energy of revelation; it serves as fuel for me.

I will make, in my own manner, the posters of the films that have shaped me but also of films invented or dreamed up. I want to confuse reality and fiction.Our daily lives have turned into the extraordinary long before this global pandemic. Whether we take the attacks of September 11, Fukushima, the mass exodus of migrants… Everything is to underline the ambiguity of a world that scripts its own collapse in a mixture of amazement and dread. Drawing, color, catchy phrases, exuberance: that’s what the form is all about. Again, I need the primitive impulse of joyful creation.When I adapted Pinocchio into a comic strip (the first animated film I saw as a kid at the cinema and which traumatized me… once more!), I had in mind to talk about globalization.

If I have hijacked a myth of popular culture, it is to give my vision of an ultra-liberal world adrift. It’s an almost unconscious process that is found throughout my work. I have a rather dark vision of our society and I feel the need to counterbalance it with a playful even grotesque form.Irony and melancholy are very good friends, as we know.The films I am going to illustrate are about a world that is collapsing. Whether it’s an invasion of the living dead, a natural disaster, a nuclear explosion, a pandemic… Yet this story, we already know. This film we have seen before.And these films about ecological disasters, or about the ends of the nuclear world, how many have we seen? Dozens, hundreds… Some will say that reality goes beyond fiction. For my part, I would say that it is fiction that takes the place of reality. The ultra-liberal world predicts its loss constantly and, better yet, seems to want to accelerate it based on previously written scenarios. The prophecy is stated; all that is left to do is to fulfill it as a good student does. Is the World aware of creating its own destruction? Why this relentlessness to produce chaos? One may find an answer in turning 2000 years back. Western culture is rooted in Judeo-Christian ideology. The foundations of the Christian religion are based on the idea of the end of times, of the apocalypse. Jesus said: “the end of times is coming soon, get ready! “

Pilar Albarracín’s new exhibition in Paris is based on a critical and political exploration of the Semana Santa («Holy Week») in Seville. For a week in April, the whole city lives to the rhythm of plural and thematic processions. About sixty fraternities commemorate the Passion of Christ by carrying pasos, richly decorated floats on which are placed extremely heavy sculptures. According to long and precise routes, the men carry the pasos at arm’s length to reach the cathedral of Seville and do penance. In absolute silence or, on the contrary, in musical effervescence, hundreds or even thousands of men move painfully towards the same geographical point. Pilar Albarracín then questions these spectacularly painful processions during which bodies are tested by beliefs, the weight of morality and respect for traditions. The new works are more tinged with violence and solemnity than with humor and irony. She proceeds in this way by blasphemous gestures to make palpable an oppression and suffocation generated by ideologies and the idea of a Spanish identity. The artist relies on the codes of Baroque art to dramatize gestures, emotions, postures and objects. Albarracín plays with the highly theatrical dimension of religious rituals to create images with powerful symbolic power. She holds a mirror to the violence inherent in the authoritarian systems against which she struggles. The title of the exhibition contains an order, then a request: no apagues mi fuego, dejame arder, «don’t put out my fire, let me burn». The fire that must not be extinguished by the other is that of her commitment, her convictions, her history, her body. She asks that the other let her burn, in hell as is implied, if that is her choice. Individual choice is at the heart of the artist’s plastic and critical reflection. During the 1970s, feminist activists advocated, and still advocate today: MY BODY, MY CHOICE. By taking up the codes and decorum of the dominant ideologies, Pilar Albarracín fights against the guidelines, taboos, morals and prohibitions that regulate and shape bodies. Through her work, she continues to demand the fundamental right to self-determination.

Julie Crenn