Tableaux vivants — Fondation Etrillard Paris – Hôtel de La Salle — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 27 → June 19, 2017

Tableaux vivants — Fondation Etrillard La fondation Etrillard propose, du 27 mai au 19 juin, Tableaux vivants, une exposition passionnante à la croisée des genres qui explore les rapports entre vidéo et peinture.

The exhibition proposed by Anna Morettini, director of the Association des Amis de la Fondation Etrillard, in collaboration with Philippe-Alain Michaud and Jonathan Pouthier — Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Pompidou –, explores the theme of the “tableau vivant” through a selection of videos and films interspersed with painting and sculpture-related questions.

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Pause. Pose.

Artists engage here in a reflection on temporal and corporeal fixity, yet by using the ultimate medium of movement.

Some artists like Eric Wurm approach the sculpture from a filmic point of view; others, such as the great Pasolini, reinterpret classical painting.

In Sebastián Diaz Morales’s Insight, the protagonists are motionless in space, time stretches, while the gap between sound and image creates a dissonance perceived in three dimensions.

Basir Mahmood immobilizes the actors as time continues to elapse, the fly reassuming the role it used to play in still lifes. In the magnificent scenery of an empty palace, Ulla von Brandenburg’s camera moves between figures frozen in their play or narcissism. In a simple setting, the short films of 1903 attributed to Oskar Messter, destined for students in Fine Arts, take a fixed look on rotating nudes which strike, in succession, the poses of classical iconography, today appearing as derisory.

The harmony of the composition, the significance of the gesture, and the diversion of classical codes are at the center of this cinematic research, as in _The Fight _by Mark Lewis, where characters are engaged in a violent and comical brawl, reminiscent of Jacques-Louis David’s Oath of the Horatii.

Erwin Wurm, 59 Stellungen (59 Positions), 1992 Vidéo, couleur, silencieux — 20' Courtesy Studio Erwin Wurm

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“Originally, cinema did not seek to reproduce the appearance of things, but to produce presence effects: before the depth of field and editing imposed it its syntax, cinema was not intended to build worlds, but to arouse apparitions — bodies detaching themselves from their frame to reveal, in the deployment of the image, the exercise of a magical power capable of breaking the immobility of the plan. If the resort to the “tableau vivant” conveyed an animistic conception of representation, it also corresponded to the desire to give film — derive from the world of show business — an aesthetic legitimation in the sphere of pictoriality. To the renewal of the “tableau vivant” in the universe of contemporary art, one can probably find a new motivation, and see in it the symptom of a change in the relationship that artists have with their own past. According to the modernist tradition, and in compliance with the Kantian principle stating that genius criterion is originality, this relation must be thought in terms of rupture. On the contrary, the “tableau vivant” encourages us to think of this link in terms of rework and despecification; thus, the film, during the period commonly known as post-modern, by reactivating the genre of the “tableau vivant”, re-appropriates the values of painting and sculpture in order to renew its principles and reformulate its laws.”

Philippe-Alain MICHAUD and Jonathan POUTHIER