Images en scène

Paris, 1993

Exhibition organised at the Palais de Tokyo by the Art 3000 association and Anne-Marie Cornu in June 1993.

The installation created for this exhibition offered several approaches to the projected image.

How do you go from painting to film?

A special lighting job was initially aimed at making a painted image look like a film image.

The right-hand side of the painting reproduced below was lit by a fixed projector, in white light, so as to give the impression of a blurred projection. This made it possible to mistake what was actually a painting for a projected image. The left-hand side was illuminated by another projector, whose light was regularly chopped up. This gave the impression of an old silent film with jerky images. Here too, the lighting transformed a simple painting into a projected image. The noisy, homemade light projector was placed on a wooden structure in the centre of the room and added sound to the ensemble.

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On the opposite wall, using the same dimensions and the same partition, a table with a white tablecloth literally emerged from the wall. Straightened vertically, the table became a painting and the tablecloth a screen. The video montage of a dinner, framed only on the table and the hands of the guests, was projected on the left side. On the right side, there was only one white plate fixed to the centre of the tablecloth. It was illuminated by a flickering light. The light was produced by a DIY project involving a mirror, a water glass and a homemade fan. The ensemble thus proposed a game of oppositions between imagination and reality, sociality and solitude, fixed and moving images.

The central structure also housed a small diptych based on projected images. On a screen made from an open book (Les Maîtres et sous-Maîtres du cadre noir de Saumur), a small Super 8 projector projected a loop of children on an old mechanical horse carousel on the left page. The right-hand page showed small, trembling horse figures projected in shadow.

Finally, on the walls of the room were numerous white plates, each containing a small electronic system that generated random noises.

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Thanks to Art 3000, Anne-Marie Cornu and Catherine Benoit.