Pascale Rémita’s work causes a slip for the writing, a multi-directional trip where set stealth scenes. Describing by words is sensitive there, it is a perilous exercise to nominate the almost unspeakable quality of found sensations and perceptions.
The title chosen by the artist for these exhibition: Attractive Point*, enlightens us about the link between this work and the notion of visible, of image, of painting and of gaze. It crystallizes the strangeness of all vision that attracts us and holds us in a unique blow. In an alignment between two spaces, from depth to surface and from particle to area, an original passage towards another dimension appears. Out of gravity, that limit point takes shapes under the effects of painting. Fascinating it stays here, in front of our eyes, attractive and dangerous.
Attractive Point brings together recent paintings and the very first video of the artist. Dialogue and confrontation animate pieces’ rapprochement with varied tones and sizes, where several iconic ranges get along with each other like different “bodies” of images. The artist grasps some shots poured in a continuous stream in digital stocks, to compose her most colorful canvases. The artificial colors pop on midnight blue of Plasma series (2004) and green and yellow shades of Psychovision dyptic (2005) show what hide these images, deliberately moved from their initial focus. Furthermore, she collects in press and media news or from diverse archives, some sights of designed sites and built spaces with faceless outlines. It is almost by motion blur that fades the space of Mirage (2004) and Tentation optique (2004). Finally, and for the first time, the artist uses one of her pictures as tool for her painting like in Sans titre (4), made in 2005. But she had worked one more time in second look, the one whose/which really sees, the first being the one of her movie in progress, which gave her required distance to hold a shifted point of view, in motion, caught in roaming of travel.
Gathered pieces corpus gives through these approaches a diving in what could form today a pictorial counterpoint to the world. In the pale oil velvet, brushing up on scatted halo the canvases thus enlightened, a threshold, a screen or a glass is depicted, behind which we remains separated even very close, glued to enigmatic images that it protects and reveals. The video travelling of Au bord d’un paysage (2005) resumes the long and slight motion that hold at the edge of their loss sites and architectures that it squares. More than a representation, it is about a shaped, colored, and lighted omnipresence, arranged in a way it can be summed up to go back in visible area from where it was escaped.
There is nobody in her movie and on her canvases, at first sight nothing seems to happen. But slowly we lose our marks in continuous floating, in suspended move where paradoxically an imminent burst gets ready.
Rumor rumbles in the field of view, the shooting range, in the no man’s land that dressed like a new theater of the world. An increasingly death show emerge from these transparent depth, from these odd, doubtful and still already seen scenes. Stealth and empty vision contained in glazes that surround it.
Where have we seen that ? When and how? Pascale Rémita catches the off-cameras of contemporary images. Aerial views, control screens, unrecognizable sites and images’ rough matter compose those reflects so precisely blurred of our period, invisible to herself. A layer hidden from glance, her its back and her its around, her its unconscious overflow. What is recognized has no name, is not touched by hands or words, however it is there. Questioning limits of representation, the artist leads us in a specific significance of visible where everything is involved, ready to hatch in unforeseeable climax. What has to be seen eludes us inexorably. It is a gaze that is unbearable with what we are trying to recognize, to depict, and that proves to be impossible to subject. The panoptic eye is drilled to light, simply bored in its inability to seize what it stakes. It is a hole in visual pulse of the world.
In their own right, theses pieces are “anti trompe l’oeil”, some resilience to disreputable and poetry, to hesitation and polymorphy. Consequently, the vice of our multimedia societies breaks out with impeach., in space and in rumor, of a few pictures. Those are from uncountable mass that exceed our ability to see it, even if we only have a look. Mention of these process in the middle of the eye, slowly painted on a canvas that assumes the loss of all control, in the heart of the most exacerbated observation of the world. Like escaped lapsus from speeches using it, these painted images on canvases are not argument for whatever it is. There is no oversight nor exposition to protect us from it.
Everything could happen and the most awful event that arises will come without scream nor rage. Throughout a diving in the very heart of pipe’s whirlpool, cathode, digital or mechanical ray tubes, new beauty appears extracted from a power now derisory and caressed by slight hands in painting’s transparency, her its softness, and her its violence, her its strength. Some new images, out of visual flow, already seen or inter-viewing, escaped of visible. Skimming, touching with fingertips an image, but never grabbing, never really understanding her its matter, an image that remains forever a landscape and that slips under our eyes.
Sandra Émonet, september 2005
Sandra Émonet is today in charge of the Public Service in the C.C.C. (Tours)
FOOTNOTE
* in english in the initial text