Je ne suis qu’une image
Galleria del Cembalo from the 27th of October 2018 to the 19th of January 2019, shows a wide selection of works by Alain Fleischer, starting from the first projects in the 70’s up to the most recent works.
Alain Fleischer is a multidisciplinary artist. His production is very prolific and protean.
With more than 50 books, 350 films and unnumbered video, photos and installations, his work is really wide. Far from any interdisciplinarity, he uses any mean of expression in its specific field. Alain Fleischer cannot be defined as a writer who makes movies or a film-maker who plays as an artist, nor a photographer making videos, but a writer, a film-maker, a photographer.
His passion for the technical aspect, and its bricolage reinterpretation, give space to unlikely inventions: one thinks to see an old vinyl on the player, while instead in reality we are looking at the projection of the video taken when the long-playing was on and turning, now seen on the vinyl player as screen. Some themes are recurrent in his work: the female face and body, the eroticism, the sense of survival, the illusion, the reflection and the double, the ritual, the world of childhood and play, the transfiguration of the shapes, the ruin, the wilderness.
The artist explores the photographic mean. Images freed of the need of representation of the visible, claim their role saying: “I’m nothing but an image”.
This statement, title of the exhibition, starts from the observation that in the movies sound becomes an image. The audio track is an optical signal presenting all the characteristics of a photography: contrast, texture, clarity. Alain Fleischer has transferred the optical image of the recorded sentence “I’m nothing but an image” on different media. The signal contour, made of waves of different frequencies, turns into a landscape, or a shape on a paper, or a contour of a blade, and so forth.
Evidences of events which have never happened, unbiased memories and therefore lying of the photographic track, still images set in motion and moving images suddenly frozen, reflections, interceptions, projections, rotations, suggest questions on their own nature and their reality. Emotions, seductions and enjoyment experienced by the author are captured to be intuitively shared by the viewer, without the need or the imperative of necessarily finding an underlying meaning or a symbolic value.
In the series Lumières oubliées (Forgotten lights), the artist deals with the etymological sense of the word “photography”, by using lanterns and bright traces.
Among videos and magic installations, the visitor will discover the “crestation” phenomenon of the cactus – a specific botanic word, defining their monstrous metamorphosis, turned into an algorithm and applied to any kind of object.
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