The exhibition that MuMa dedicates to Nicolas de Staël gives us the opportunity to question the materiality of the image. Light as a raw material. It passes through the eye of a painter who restores it in his landscapes: glowing in the South, changing in the North. In the films of Nathaniel Dorsky and Paul Clipson, it flows into the camera lens and fixes into film, writing that subtle partition of clear and dark, revealing the optical magic of the recording device.
Device set aside by practitioners of direct cinema, cameraless film, who paint directly on the film as Stan Brakhage and Emmanuel Lefrant. The film strip is no longer simply the space where the image is formed, it increases in thickness and becomes the concrete support of the pictorial material. A different material for the image, the pixel has only temporal reality, but may be subject to speculation. In the work of Jacques Perconte, compressions and decompressions allow passages from the figurative to the abstract, without opposing them, as in the painting of Staël.
