A Cyclopean Eye Their latest series of paintings, the Switch pieces, does not look frontally at the real or at representation, as one does when facing a TV or computer screen, but looks inside and from the inside. Here, then, we are no longer in front of a window, or beside or on the other side of a frame, or over a table, or beneath a grid, or facing a screen/painting, but through the tube generated by the image and, before that, the founding components of the image. The Switch pieces focus on that moment when the TV turned off, that short moment when the image contracts into itself, shrinking into a dot that gets further and further away then leaves the realm of the legible, if not the visible-or rather, becomes one with that blind spot of the cathode tube that our human vision cannot reach, but where it remains present like a Cyclopean eye, waiting once again to open. And the still remaining elements of the perceptual or the retinal give way to the productive; the forms that hung on give away to figural turbulence. For in these luminous, colored figures something of the image remains, something of its trace and memory-or at least, something of the way it attains visibility. And Jugnet and Clairet seem indeed to stand at this point, inside this point where the image is absorbed, as if there were a need to switch and turn the screen/painting around from the side of the black hole of its production. Like the painting Alpine, TX #193-1 presented for the first time on the stand of Galerie Carlier/Gebauer, Berlin, at this year’s FIAC. Thus, rather than reproducting or representing the world, Jugnet & Clairet de/produce the image that the world presents. In doing so, they question both the heart of the image and its present-day reality. Likewise, their paintings are neither abstract nor figurative: they are the very field in which the image comes to visibility through a representation that is not situated in space, which is enabled nowadays by computer digitalization, which analogically reverses (or scrupulousy superimposes) the capture of the image and its rendering, well before ant idea of figuration comes into it. And this new field of possibility which they have just opened up for pictorial space seems unlimited in its fertility. Translation, C. Penwarden Charles-Arthur Boyer In Art Press n°287 February 2003 (excerpts) | ||||||
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