藝評

Ariane Michel is a young French artist working with videos and films as presented here. With apparent simplicity but a great sensibility for light and landscape, Michel has been developing a body of work which, though seemingly detached from topical fashions in contemporary art and following its own light path, has established itself as a thouroughly unusual and innovating practice. It is a both subtle and fascinatingly unsettling work because it undermines our perception of the world. When Michel, as in Rêve de cheval, films horses which suddenly become agitated when disturbed by an outside element, she literally manages to instil the animal’s fear in viewers : we too suddenly become watchful, standing on the brink of another world, which appears all the more disquieting as it is unknown and hence unnamable. When, as in Après les pluies, the artist confronts us with a barren landscape whose sole inhabitant is a lonely dog, a landscape that seems frozen in time and bears not the slightest trace or memory of human life, we are caught by a slight malaise : a feeling of desolation, utter solitude and the sudden and strange impression to be touching upon a different world which, while close, remains undistinguishable for our senses, since it exists wholly outside of us and without us. In her film Les Hommes and her video Sur la terre, which thrusts us into the interminable sleep of morses, plants and stones, the sleep of the Earth, Ariane Michel takes this impression a step further. By erasing in us the very perception of human time, she immerses us in a sort of boundless infinity where we see ourselves pass along the horizon as hardly detectable elements in the infinite flow of time. The magic of this work owes mainly to the stunning beauty of the imagery and sound to which, as a true cinéaste who needs no words to express herself, Michel gives full strength. Yet it also stems from the way Michel pushes Man back to the fringes of the world, forcing him to abandon the central perspective which he has long ago unquestioningly appropriated and keeps applying to his surroundings. This individual is no one but us as we find ourselves propelled to the doorstep of an unsuspected parallel world. Exhibition: Ariane Michel: The Screening and les Hommes Date: 19.5 – 9.8.2008 Venue: Agnes b.’s librairie Galerie Address: 1/F, 18 Wing Fung Street, Wan Chai Enquiries: 852 2869 5505