Bringing together avant-garde artists, both historical and contemporary, around innovative image practices (installations and experiments with still and moving images), the Offscreen fair offered us a truly remarkable second edition. Here are some of the works that particularly resonated with us, among the international galleries gathered this year at the Grand Garage Haussmann.
© Thomas Devaux
We had a strange encounter in the third loop of the Grand Garage Haussmann: Orshi Drozdik, a Hungarian feminist neo-conceptual artist born in 1946 and living in New York since the early 1980s. Having conceived her series Individual mythology (Individual Mythology) In the mid-1970s, by superimposing photos of dancers and her own body onto which images of Hungarian history were projected, she showed, with her Budapest gallerist, Gábor Einspach (of Einspach Fine Art & Photography), among other photographic and video documents, annotated photographs of a performance carried out in 1977 in Toronto entitled I try to be transparent. (I'm trying to be transparent). Lying naked on a sheet of plexiglass suspended three meters above the ground, facing a mirror, she was trying to become transparent in order to be visible in art history… A paradoxical process echoing the obliteration of the image performed in the film Site of 1965 from Stan VanDerBeek, a pioneering multimedia artist in the field of experimental cinema and computer art who died in 1984. Decomposed onto three screens by The Film Gallery (Paris), it shows a man dressed in white (in this case, the American artist Robert Morris) manipulating, in a strange silent choreography, large white panels in an attempt to hide the image of theOlympia Manet's mimed by the American performance artist Carolee Schneemann.
Cutouts and obliterations
Another game of image appearance and obliteration, the work from the series Sombras del sur y del norte (Shadows of the North and South) made in 2001 by Graciela Sacco, an Argentinian artist who died in 2017, represented by Rolf Art (Buenos Aires): recycling, amidst a political and societal crisis, an archival image from May 1968 showing a man throwing a paving stone, the installation consists of projections of fragments of the image printed onto suspended plastic plates illuminated by a light source. Decomposed and reduced to cast shadows, the image flickers and, at the same time, confronts us with the enigma of the repetition of historical events.
Twenty years later, it is also the historical facts that are of interest Emmanuel van der Auwera (represented by Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels). Having collected images of the storming of the Capitol from the internet 1he composed a Video sculpture As seductive as it is unsettling. Fragmented into 30 screens, partially slashed to remove the polarizing filters, the torn image disappears and reappears between the knife-cut "comic strips." A flicker that makes the image oscillate between abstraction and figuration, which speaks volumes about our blinded, oversaturated gaze, which now only sees superficially… “Screens imprison the gaze […] I want the viewer to become aware of their central role as a viewer, revealing by veiling [because] the veiled image arouses the desire to see,” explains the Brussels-based artist, born in 1982, who, in his series memento, He pushes the erasure and distortion of the image further. Playing with these distortions by overexposing an offset plate coated with photosensitive emulsion to "burn" the image, he makes it appear in a kind of ghostly state.
Transmutation
For him, it is a true transmutation of the image that is achieved Thomas Devaux (1980), represented by the Royal Ice Rink of Brussels. At the boundary between photography and painting, his elegant totems They reveal shimmering gold, bluish, or iridescent reflections that frame the enlarged and irradiated, and therefore invisible, image of consumer goods. This is achieved through pigment printing on dichroic glass – a precious glass with fascinating reflections. 2 —, the transmutation is all the more disturbing because the burial of the image is compounded by the shimmering, trapping the viewer in his own image… Mixed with the barely visible fragments of photographed supermarket products, this makes us doubly consenting victims of consumerism and voyeurism. "My work focuses on desire, the energies that inhabit us when we desire an object," The visual artist and photographer explains that, playing on the mystical aura emanating from the mirrored surfaces of his glass and also from his gold-leaf-gilded frames, he confronts us with the deceptive mirror of consumer society, with "This obscure object of desire." 3 "...
- The assault on the United States Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump contesting the results of the presidential elections in Washington, January 6, 2021.
- Dichroic glass is covered with a thin layer of quartz and metallic oxides.
- Title borrowed by the artist from Luis Buñuel to present his trilogy Shoppers-Rays-Dichroics.
@OFFSCREEN_Paris
Einspach Fine Art (Budapest): einspach.com
The Film Gallery (Paris): film-gallery.org
Rolf Art (Buenos Aires): rolfart.com.ar
Harlan Levey Projects (Brussels): hl-projects.com
The Royal Ice Rink (Brussels): prvbgallery.com