Point de fuite

Metamorphoses in images, their capacity to make my gaze elastic, is what fascinates me. I pay special attention to this when I look at images. For instance, lately I have been turning a lot of images around, looking at them upside down, one quarter that way and then the other. And I ask myself time and again: what is left over from my perception of the image when I first looked at it? Did something valuable emerge from this disorientation?

For this kind of viewing adventure, books are my favourite. The other day I looked at some books upside down from the first to the last page; it was an alienating and also liberating experience. The floor becomes the ceiling; I look for something to hold on to in the image in order to recognize something and, at the same time, it is precisely this unstable moment that is the most exciting. Some perceptions persist in an unexpected way and with some images it does not work at all. In that process, I experience that the image frees itself, as it were. It dissolves into a kind of diffuse essence.

I also like to use mirrors to look at images. They create a caesura in my perception that sometimes feels like a relief. This is because the reflection is like a dreamed piece of reality in which I can wander. A fiction that is in fact just as real as the original image hidden behind the mirror.

The intrinsic moving power of images, their potential annihilation as well as duplication offers me a salutary aesthetic experience. The ultimate escape.