“I like these pieces of writing that slide into brushstrokes. It is a representation of the world that aims to reach the point of getting us to move away from it in order to swing over into something else.”

“…for these images start off very small on a computer in an office, even if their strangeness and exoticism very soon give them an aura of divinity. Before shining forth, they start off as nothing. “ (1)

As part of her work in plastic art, since 2003 Pascale Rémita has been involved in a remarkable and painstaking deconstruction of the flux and images currently at work in our mediatised society. In a recent interview, referring to an imaginary narrative device, the writer Jean-Jacques Schuhl admitted to dreaming of the author as a kind of receiver. Following his example, Pascale Rémita has for a long time deliberately assumed a stance of capturing a ghostlike or hidden iconology. Conducted in the manner of an impersonal survey, her works are fragmented and anonymous accounts that challenge our relationship to imagery, its mobility and persistency. Retinal or mental in nature, this does indeed mean questioning status and movements, in what Benjamen called “the unconsciousness of vision”-the way in which our gaze appropriates and incorporates representations via collective, personal and affective memory. When she is not dipping into a huge pool of signs and particular retranslation, Pascale Rémita sounds out these images’ reception, as well as the optical combinations that they may assume in an exhibition context. Through data gleaned on the Internet, random and non-systematic archiving, the artist will not rest until she has auscultated the various strata and dimensions that make up and sustain our modern realm. Mimicking a process that is empirical rather than arbitrary, the original photograph that she has decided to “process” might thereby be transformed into a landscape at the root of a canvas or an enlargement; a report made while travelling might become the basis for a mental loop. By processing the pictorial matter using changeable and disconcerting focal lengths, the artist develops a complex and sensitive dubbing of contemporary codes and data. Landscaped perspectives, mountain or snow scenes, multiple and indistinct mineralogy-the subjects of Pascale Rémita’s canvasses foster a generalized aesthetic of the area and backdrop, shady spaces and infra-thin luminosiity. At the crossroads of temporality and topography, Pascale Rémita’s productions orchestrate surfaces and depths as if they were sound boxes or echo chambers. Via porosity and permeability, one of the distinctive features of the artist’s work lies in the way in which she challenges our familiar perceptions of the painted or filmed image. By developing an interplay of sensory correspondences using the illustrated or elliptical storyboard of her pieces, Pascale Rémita charts exploded and fragmented awareness of the phenomena.

IMAGO MUNDI
Painting goes hand in hand here with the action or experience of the sieve and filter, a potential grid for perceiving the contents of the modern bubble. The artist readily employs and plucks references from the language of computing and the field of visual date processing. Such a vocabulary might act as a clue to explaining and approaching Pascale Rémita’s preconceptions or formal interests. If the artist delights in immersing herself in concepts from the imagery of telecommunication, which she makes her own, it is probably because they convey worldviews and representative notions. “Modern vision is one that has subjected to specific geometric laws the way representing distances between things and our distance to things, and thus the way of seeing them.” (2) While navigating in the world of images and its lexical spectrum, the artist is looking for monads and processes that imitate the existing methods of iconographical interpretation. Pascale Rémita’s work consequently brings out this way, whose technique invariably influences the inherent perception of the world in which we move, and which describes the framework of a contemporary paradigm. Entitled Contours actifs, Pascale Rémita’s twofold exhibition takes its name fro a notion in image processing and remote sensing. A contour actif (“active contour”) is a “set of points to be displaced in order to delineate an object outline”; it is also referred to as a “data extraction technique”. These elements may also be the generic by-line to the exhibition’s overall installation, like a story within a story. Pascale Rémita’ s production evolves via the entanglement of information and historical and cultural elements. Trough a corpus of animated and sound images, drawings and paintings, the artist’s pieces act as residual spaces, explained by effects of proximity and contiguity. It is therefore probably no coincidence that these pieces have titles such as Psychovision, Champs magnétique (“magnetic field “), Plasma or Mirage.

TOPOGRAPHY AND PICTURA FABRICA
In several places the artist acts as geographer or psychographer. Sequence shots of earthly environments, flat mapping of desert-scapes and vastness, Pascale Rémita’s painting is like something between cartography and topology. The whiteness of the canvas recalls the navigators’ terra incognita, with the white spot conventionally representing the unknown or unexplored. In remote sensing, we also refer to image zones or segmentation. This is to distinguish the image’s geometrical features, properties and intensity. The models from which Rémita draws her inspiration include SPOT satellite images, geo-strategic programmes or systems of shape recognition, stereovision and the tracking of moving objects. The artist views and apprehends our relationship with the world in the form of network of exchanges, thereby challenging this active presence of the world and its echo, via the notion of imaginary vision or fossil images. There is very much a sense of déjà vu at work in her works. The artist refers to “intuitive landscapes” when describing the sensitive and mnesic apprehension characteristic of her work. Here, territory should be understood in a broad sense-a flurry of reflections, shocks, and collisions, physical and visual shifts. Displayed in appositional and collage form, her pieces develop within a movement of networked elements; frames of micro or intra fictions orchestrate these units, establishing a dynamic of linkage. The sequencing that Pascale Rémita regularly uses in the layout of her paintings seems to be something directly out of animated imagery, taken from the process of repetition and giving the impression of segmented movement or of stationary scanning. The artist’s triptychs are a case in point. Trough this multi-stage editing, some of her canvases see to come from a video shot and vice versa. In the video Au bord du paysage, the action is similar to a long transit with neither beginning nor end-travelling that conveys a sense of crossing as a way of bordering a subject or territory. Au bord du paysage (lit. “at the landscape’s edge”), the utterance might appear as a postulate or a programme. (3)

WARBURGIAN VIEWPOINTS
In literary criticism, we refer in particular to internal and external focalisation about a type of narrative and to the point of view adopted therein. Pascale Rémita’s work is something of real-time experimentation of the omniscient system of images that surrounds and envelopes us. In this respect, it is worth nothing that we talk about a panoptic vision when we encounter the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.”. (4)