RE-PLAY

AFTER CHRISTIAN MARCLAY

2009

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Installation: photographs, pins

Approximately 300 x 600 cm

In the same vein as the series Tableaux, Re-play (after Christian Marclay) replays an installation in which the artist had pinned thousands of snapshots face to the wall. The title is a clin d’oeil to Marclay’s exhibition RE-PLAY at the Cité de la musique in Paris, in 2007.

Noting that papers change in a very disparate way when they yellow with age, I imagined that these photographs could form the elements of a colour chart which I could use to create a digital image the size of a wall, made by hand, pixel by pixel – each photograph corresponding to a shade of grey. The result could hence be looked at both in a synthetic and analytical way, in as much as the back of the photographs are often daubed with hand-written notes, stamps or signs which invite us to fill in the absence of the picture with all kinds of stories. It’s a question of symbolically making an image of a ‘digital’ nature appear, resulting from an accumulation of film photography images. Like a contemporary vanitas, this installation, underpinned by a pun (the word ‘more’ spelled out on the wall sounds like the French word ‘mort’, meaning death), stresses the ontological bond between our desire of always wanting more pictures and the awareness of our finite existence.