John Smith — Le Baiser — La Galerie, centre d’art contemporain — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: September 27 → December 13, 2014

La Galerie is launching the season with France’s first major exhibition by British filmmaker John Smith. Following on the seven-film series Hotel Diaries (2001 — 2007), shown in September 2013, The Kiss brings together ten recent and earlier works — one of them being shown for the first time — in which documentary and fiction, representation and abstraction are separated only by the most tenuous of boundaries.

Often drawing on the artist’s everyday existence, with jump-cuts from his bedroom to his neighbourhood, Smith’s video work effects text-inflected shifts between the documentary aspect of his images and the terrain of fiction.

In the late 1970’s Smith began simultaneously integrating and distancing the structuralist approach of experimental British cinema, whose recourse to set, repeated games emphasised the medium’s material properties while playing down narrative content.

For him form and content remain indissociable: most often fiction, improvisation and randomness determine the actual structure of his films and their concurrently lighthearted and conceptual exploration of cinematic language. In turn the technological developments he regularly incorporates into his own language — 16mm, video, image bank material, editing software, etc. — determine the narrative construction of his films.