Negatoscopes

”“In the area of the cave where Charley Case and I were attempting to reveal and highlight what was anchored in the stone, with Bloody Ideas I revealed the monster sleeping in the child’s skull. Bloody Ideas clearly refers to the far-right group in the European Parliament. I literally bled the faces of these political leaders with bloodthirsty ideas. I subsequently used the same technique to produce other “modified negatoscopes”, these light boxes which are used to look at medical X-ray images, between memento mori and mental images. I like Facing Time, a beautiful portrait of a couple in which we can feel the references of Flemish painting, whilst at the same time it is peaceful: they are almost immobile portraits in the 3D scan of a skull, portraits that disappear one after another, speaking of the couple but also of our ontological solitude. Here I am addressing the essential structure of the being: bone, which is also our history. We are living in an age of amnesiac consumption, where there is a negation of what constitutes the memory of our being, be it through the evolution over 20,000 years of the hunter-gatherer or of the foetus until our death, and even more so in the Internet age. With Internet we no longer retain anything, as we believe we no longer need to, thanks to “externalised memories”, but without memory there is no means of placing things in perspective. History and meaning are being forgotten, in favour of immediate, emotional, inconsequent and amnesiac present consumption. I am probably even more sensitive to this obligation of memory owing to my Jewish roots, but it is also connected to the loss of memories following the death of my mother, when I was 19. I obliterated part of my memory of her from that time, perhaps out of a need to protect myself psychologically… Attempting to retrieve this memory has certainly influenced my artistic research, which sometimes points towards unexpected founts of memory, such as bones, symbolic spaces (automatic writing) and others which I often discover after having created the work. It is always about setting off in search of sorts of proto-truths buried within me, wild entities, which are fleeting, but which I have to “fix” in a significant context in order to be able to capture them, giving them an artistic form so as to be able to recognise them. There is a superb quotation by Michel Serres, speaking of the relationship with the dead, although I believe it also applies to any introspective research: “One day we have to open the obscure door, advance towards the first steps and seek a light to recognise ourselves in the shadows that are so ancient that our humiliated flesh is already accustomed to it.”

Thomas IsraelTHE MEMORY OF THE BODY Interview with Philippe Franck in Memento Body - La lettre vollée 2013