PUBLICATIONS
Mélina Bismuth, Painting with Photographs
"Flow up : creative process and forms of life" by Samuel Tronçon,
Philosopher and Researcher in computer science applied to social sciences
Melina Bismuth's work demonstrates two parallel, disconnected and convergent processes. The first is sensory, it is entirely devoted to the immediate aesthetic experience, at the discretion of urban wanderings in search of subjects, mainly scaffolding, places in reconstruction, colorful tarpaulins. When a subject is found, comes the shooting, long sessions to photograph a construction site tarpaulin from every angle, a frenzy of capture, a liberating and exciting moment. The second process is cerebral, it is carried out in the shadows, meticulous, infinite, time-consuming and frustrating. The same gesture repeated a thousand times, a thousand times unsatisfactory. Hundreds of photographic fragments to assemble, adjust, test, classify, reject, reserve... To achieve, after dozens of hours, a stable state where no part moves: a few holes remain, but the design finally appears, despite constraints that are almost impossible to resolve.
The first moment ultimately only lasts a very short time. It is totally open and full of freedom, realized in the sensory and emotional space. And yet, it ends with the definitive inscription on a digital storage medium, neatly arranged in a tree structure of which there is little chance of coming out one day. Conversely, the second moment takes place over a long, repetitive and cerebral period of time. It takes place in a space of constraints: no transformation of the raw material, an implacable grid, only rotations and translations. But at the end, it takes shape and lives again in the analog world.
This duality of the process has nevertheless a point of convergence. This is the moment when the shape becomes decided. The first process collects the material. The second inscribes an abstract form in the reality. But first, at the origin of everything, there’s an emotion which gives the direction in which seeking. This emotion is drawn so as not to be forgotten. And then we wait for the ideal moment to realize it. Either because you have to find colors and textures. Or because we have to find the energy and the strength to tackle the space of constraints, and therefore the often very intense effort, which it represents and requires. That space is materialized by a grid, which is decided and sets the rules of the game, rule to which the artist must submit even though she has chosen it.
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Illustration:Quarries of tesserae
Process 1
Break the gaze, embrace reality
The first process fragments the visual experience to seek out pieces of reality, such as so many tesserae, which find themselves transfigured in the shot. There is something alike the harvest of mosaic materials, but not only. We start from a plastic tarpaulin placed on a scaffolding, a poor, rough, dusty material, and we draw from it luminous, fragile pieces and colorful. We break the gaze to reveal new visions. Reflections, veils, folds and folds, transparencies, moires, braiding, knots... What emerges from the cutting produced by the shooting is both something else and the same thing. We can recognize it, but we perceive it differently.
We could imagine that the same result would be obtained by making cuts from a view of the complete object, but it is false. The act of approaching and blending into the object, passing through the veils to look at them from within, produces, through the multiplicity of points of view, a representation certainly fragmented, but above all in four dimensions. There is not just the two-dimensional images, but multiple facets of the object (dimension 3), and above all, there is time (dimension 4): the same point of view on a moving veil, these are so many different events, so many veils, in one single unit of vision.
Beyond fragmentation, the first process produces a tessellation in events which form the very substance of the visual experience of the object. The tarpaulin that flutters in the wind, crossed by light, is transcribed through the thousands of micro events which arise there and last only a few milliseconds: the flow of light which passes through a few square centimeters of braided canvas, the shadow of a plastic veil on itself, the effects of transparency and opacity of several superimposed layers of textile, the abrupt and sensual contact of the white fabric which fades into the sky...
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Illustration:Tesserae
Process 2
Coping, exhausting the undecidable
The second process reconstructs in a formal and abstract space an experienced emotion, fixed in the moment of life by means of a sketch followed by notes and an assembly plan. This first step is crucial, crystallization. It will initiate the entire process and provide both the aesthetic power of the painting and the energy required for its composition. The trigger is emotional, physical, destabilizing: an event creates the mental conditions which allow to perceive an image whose representation becomes necessary. To build, rebuild, maintain, or cope, it's the same. It's a little like giving a name to an emotion that is still alive to better control it, like the cry then its articulation replace pain for Wittgentstein, so as not to be directly affected by it, to put it at distance and grasp it rather than endure it. When the image is captured, put on paper, it is necessary to associate it with an assembly plan that makes it viable and buildable. We will choose a grid composed of squares, rectangles or strips to be juxtaposed. Dimensions will depend on the emotional image to be drawn and the level of details required, because you have to be able to compose only from raw photos, without transformation. We therefore have grids which can take very varied dimensions, from 4x4 to nxn, between 16 and n2 tesserae.
Illustration: The design: a grid and a sketch.
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Once the grid has been obtained, a space of constraints has been defined, with simple rules: we know the number of images to find, there will be no retouching or transformation and the images must be combined step by step to form the desired picture. We can translate or flip an image, we can decide to use it or not, but that's it. Here we touch on the paradox of following a rule in philosophy. It is the existence of the rule which makes it possible to make the act intelligible, but it is not necessary to know the rule to interact and achieve meaning. The rule followed by the artist is entirely private, idiosyncratic, it is not necessary for understanding the table, but it allows the implicit construction of a visual emotion by offering it a space for realization/achievement, it doesn’t matter whether we know it. In short, the rule here is a necessary condition for self-reappropriation, a bit like these contemplative games used by Marina Abramovic to enter in the “flow” and increase perceptual faculties tenfold.
To start, as many fragments as possible must be gathered, in sufficient numbers relative to the quantity of necessary tesserae: sometimes 100, sometimes 2000 are thus summoned. We put them down, we put them away, we try to order them to make the search easier: by color, by brightness, by material, by texture...
We must create order before the entropy that will follow. We then place a first fragment, then two, then three. And with each tile added, it is an additional constraint for the future: the next one must come to fit perfectly with the previous one, including when it comes to introducing a break: the discontinuity itself must be adjusted to make sense.
Instead of decreasing complexity, adding fragments into the plan only increases uncertainty and difficulty, because when a piece is missing in the middle of a solid color, it is 2.3 or n adjustments possibilities that must be taken into account. And here again, the decision, at each stage: the fact of posing is not a flash, it is not obvious or an intuition, it is a choice after many attempts. Exactly the opposite of what takes place in the first process: each gesture engages the following and requires assuming possible responsibility for the additional disorder that it will generate for the future, or of the order that it will impose on what exists. And if the missing piece does not exist, you will have to wait for it to appear by itself during a another shooting session, or recompose entire sections of the painting to do without it.
Uncertainty is perfectly embodied in this moment: it is the probability that the missing piece does not exist which gives full meaning to the entire process, if not to the entire work.
As in information theory (Shannon): a certain event contains no information, it is the fragility of the assemblage and the uncertainty to which it bears witness at every moment which gives its meaning to all. Everything here is just an unstable equilibrium at the end of a long process composed of phases of maximum entropy followed by moments of relative calm, with the “bag and surf” of successive assemblages.
Illustration: Entropy and stability.
Alongside uncertainty, there is also what we call undecidability (Turing, Livet, Tronçon). Each gesture being a decision, each decision being entangled with the others, the whole forms a chain of determinism which applies progressively. Even though the possibilities are endless, even though the uncertainty increases, the number of tiles available to fit into a space is terribly reduced, to the point of dizziness. In most cases the process quickly becomes deterministic, the fragment adjusts or does not adjust, we can decide, we can continue, we are reassured. It is this form of completeness, at each stage, always locally, which nourishes the hope of being able to arrive at the end of the painting. But sometimes the fragment neither fits nor adjusts, it produces a bifurcation, makes it undecidable the process because it calls into question the rule we have given ourselves, the image we seek to get. We can change the rule, we can revisit the image, start all the work again, but know if this bifurcation indicated by the undecidable piece deserves to be followed or not, it is impossible. This undecidable piece, there necessarily exists at least one each time, so it becomes the witness of the process, which both corrupts and sustains. It is the proof and the test of the design. Subject of obsession for the artist, who will not find rest or temporarily, a source of radical incompleteness despite the apparent completeness of the painting, it is a bit like this real or fantasized piece that we constantly look at when look closely at Melina Bismuth's paintings. Through the continuities and discontinuities, the gaze anticipates the moment when things could go wrong, where a singularity could appear, an abnormal event. And the more we look for it, the more we believe we have found it, and the more we realize that each time it is in its place and totally incongruous, that it is in the rule without being one of them. The possibility of this piece is the paradoxical moment which produces a slight dizziness, between the desire to get lost in the detail of the intertwining, and the need to look further away on dry land, the entire movement which goes astray.
Robert Pujade, Historian of photography and art Critic,
"About Mélina Bismuth’s artworks"
Why undo or remake of the world? This question latently animates any artistic creation, and making artworks rarely used this question as a theme of their production. It’s in this context that I place Mélina Bismuth’s paintings- a work awaiting the total reconstitution of the visible world.
Each of her creations takes as material a myriad of photographs attached to each other. They are proof that her imaginary buildings come from reality and that only their methodical assortment is an invention. They represent various objects (fabrics, scaffolding, reflections – to name just a few) which, linked together by an art of assembly, construct facades, planets, floating shapes or optical distortions.
Mélina Bismuth’s world is thus born thanks to the combination of these photographed elements, multiplied to the point of erecting unrealistic spaces, foreign to our vision accustomed to what appears to us to be reality. An admirable and strange world which could pass for abstract if we did not recognize the eye of photography in her creation.
The assembly technique is laborious because in the juxtaposition of the photographs the shaping of the effects of relief and depth is decided, mainly through the differentiation of colors. Furthermore, the ordering of the graphics requires very careful work since they play a narrative role in these tables. Thus, the sidereal atmosphere that reigns in the painting "Lo Profundo es el Aire" is produced by the graphic interweaving of the green lines of a floating city and the gray-beige background slabs which are reminiscent of a gigantic aerolite. In this example, the title assigned to the final image only names one aspect of the overall construction which itself remains nameless and not without reason. Isn’t one of the paintings called "Beyond Words" ? Isn’t a series of three entitled "Not Here", thus designating an “elsewhere” as much as the absence of an explanatory title?
We should therefore not expect the titles to tell us into which world we are immersing the paintings. They demonstrate a cultivated impertinence: let's not look for the shape of a pin-up in the painting "Belle de Nuit", or the illustration of a famous song in "Sodade". All these nominations refuse to provide an explanation of art and prefer to place us face to face with the unspeakable. However, they occupy an essential place for the understanding of the painting by inviting the viewer to enter directly into a spirit of discrepancy which is at the center of each of the works.
Reading a painting by Mélina Bismuth is, in fact, a two-dimensional exercise: firstly, an overview of the extreme abstraction which seduces with the beauty of the colors and a rigorous structure, then an analytical view and particularized details which reveal the content of the painting: a plurality of concrete images. All the originality of the work lies in this pairing of realism and abstraction through which the artist works to undo and remake the world.