Thierry Kuntzel
2021Time Smoking a Picture
Thierry Kuntzel
In Time Smoking a Picture, simple gestures and images — a figure smoking a cigarette, a frame within a frame — unfold in time as elusive manifestations of reality and representation, transformed by barely perceptible variations of shifting color and passages of light. Raymond Bellour has written of Kuntzel's achievement in "representing the unrepresentable: the spatial or temporal in-between created by the disjunction/conjunction between mental representation and perception, surface and depth... past and present, conscious and unconscious. As the hero — the author and original spectator — establishes his presence, crossing the room in both frames at once, we are given the outline of what representation holds out to fiction: the hero's gaze into the window, where he can see his life slipping past, inside and outside."
Time Smoking a Picture
La peinture cubiste
Thierry Kuntzel, Philippe Grandrieux
Commissioned for the French television series Regards Entendus, La peinture cubiste is a multilayered, elusive investigation of the perception of reality and representation through cinema, painting and video. Unfolding as an evocative, implied fictional narrative, this work was suggested by a Jean Paulhan text in which a man experiences and perceives everyday life as though in the multifaceted space of a Cubist painting. Alternating between film and video, Kuntzel and Grandrieux explore physical and psychical perception, constructing an analogy between the way video transforms conventional filmic representation and the way Cubism fractured the perspectival codes of classical pictorial space. Shifting between abstraction and materiality, the real and the imaginary, this work suggests passages between painting, cinema and video.
The Cubist Painting
Nostos I
Thierry Kuntzel
Kuntzel describes this work: "Three people, or rather three silhouettes of rare objects — frames, windows perhaps, a[n] illustrated manuscript — and a few minimal actions: pages being leafed through, someone sitting down, someone lying down, getting up, crossing a space, lighting a cigarette, a head turning, a mouth opening, someone looking around. There is hardly any representation in Nostos I: just enough to tip-toe around the edges of analogy, illusion, under the image and in between images." Unfolding as memory traces and dream images, figures and objects appear and disappear, decompose and recompose; disjointed fragments evolve in continuous transformation and manipulations of light and time.
Nostos I
