INCONJUGUÉ
Opening on Thursday, November 14 at 5 p.m.
The exhibition runs from November 14 to December 14, 2002.
Nicolas Renaud is known for his installations and his videos, with their close-ups of the human body which combine expressive and physiological functions in a method that belongs to the performance tradition. In Parler de quelqu'un à soi-même, for example, a mouth obstructed by ice speaks with difficulty before the ice slowly melts and the oozing orifice becomes a more functional organ that recovers sensation and audible speech. In Articulations (1998), the eyelids are harnessed to the lower lip. Under this prosthetic torture, the articulation of each word raises and tugs at the eyelids.
Dazibao presents Inconjugué, Nicolas Renaud's new video installation, along with four short tapes. While Inconjugué maintains continuity with the earlier work, it marks a departure from the body - with the exception of a single close-up of a mouth - and distances itself from performance. Here Renaud turns the camera away from himself. But the fundamental concerns of his work remain : a single shot, a single take, without cuts, in which the image stirs to life through duration. It is over time that things come to light. The artist is seeking, far from instantaneousness, the moment of rupture in the familiar movement of things.
Inconjugué's immobile frames, arranged in tableaux so that the spectator can take in the entire area at once, create a temporality of the thing represented. This temporality becomes the subject of the work, in which different moments of the same shot, of the same duration, loom up simultaneously. Like the river visible at the bottom of one of the images in this work, time flows from one frame to the next. And yet the river's water, although it symbolises time, is a unified whole, occupying its bed with a single movement. The present that passes before our eyes, as we stand on the shore, has been and will be present elsewhere. The title of the work might suggest, then, the state of these video tableaux in the spectator's absence, before a subject takes up a position before them - a subject whose gaze situates things in time.