I wanted to combine, in one environment, a proposition that takes two forms: a video installation based exclusively on photography; and, in parallel, another space for exhibiting photograph prints. The featured images are variations and developments of the video installation In Cryo Video. Research sources and steps that were used in the process to create the video installation are also an extension of it, a frozen stretch of time, a sort of secondary effect. This work plays on obsessions, complexity, improbability, experimentation, processes, contradictions, materials and supports. It is empirical, inviting error, accident, fragility, the organic, the mineral, and light. These approaches involve imagery, representation, the senses, and the body. The project is also a vehicle, in my view, for issues to do with science, biology, geology, the environment, humankind, time and icons. My work’s sources and perspectives are notions of limits, spaces, cycles, conservations, collections, losses, destructions, of life and death. My work lies outside any determined subject and paradoxically leads me, while exaggerating or using fixity, towards research and an approach or idea of movement – an absolute if ever there was one. The video installation In Cryo Video is based on photographic instants and materials – fixed, frozen, preserved memories – in an attempt to set them in motion, in relief or volume; a state of becoming something. During the creative process, this proposition for an artistic approach became a sort of field for experimenting scientifically, biologically and geologically with images – a test tube for video material, an experimentation on the life and loss of images. Photography is a support and a frozen memory, addressed like an organic material, treated like a skin, constrained by ice, a living memory, an uncontrollable material, a space for imperceptible movement. Endangered and rendered fragile, the photography is frozen in ice, destroyed but hyper-preserved; it becomes the raw material of its own evolution and extinction, taking part in the melting of its support. Analogue and organic images, virtual owing to their frozen liquid supports, project digital and videographic virtualities. This piece about time, in which the disappearance of images rhymes with the capturing of images. It is a proposition for three portraits, set in motion and gazes; a synchronisation and desynchronisation of times; movements inside and between the images.
Éric Mutel