Bringing together avant-garde artists, both historical and contemporary, around innovative image practices (installations and experiments with still and moving images), the Offscreen fair offered us a truly remarkable second edition. Here are some of the works that particularly resonated with us, among the international galleries gathered this year at the Grand Garage Haussmann.

It was a strange encounter we had in the third loop of the Grand Garage Haussmann: Orshi Drozdik, a Hungarian feminist neo-conceptual artist born in 1946 and living in New York since the early 1980s. Having conceived her series Individuális mitológia (Individual Mythology) in the mid-1970s by superimposing photos of dancers and her own body onto which images of Hungarian history were projected, she was showing, with her Budapest gallerist, Gábor Einspach (of Einspach Fine Art & Photography), among other photographic and video documents, annotated photographs of a performance she staged in Toronto in 1977 entitled I Try to Be Transparent. Lying naked on a sheet of plexiglass suspended three meters above the ground, facing a mirror, she attempted to become transparent in order to be visible in the history of art…

A paradoxical process echoing the obliteration of the performed image in the 1965 film Site by Stan VanDerBeek, a pioneering multimedia artist in the field of experimental cinema and computer art who died in 1984. Decomposed into three screens by The Film Gallery (Paris), it shows a man dressed in white (in this case, the American artist Robert Morris) manipulating, in a strange silent choreography, large white panels to try to hide the image of Manet's Olympia mimed by the American performance artist Carolee Schneemann.

CUTOUTS AND CANCELS

Another play on the appearance and obliteration of the image is found in the work from the series Sombras del sur y del norte (Shadows of the North and South), created in 2001 by Graciela Sacco, an Argentinian artist who died in 2017 and is represented by Rolf Art (Buenos Aires). Recycling, amidst a political and societal crisis, an archival image from May 1968 showing a man throwing a paving stone, the installation consists of projections of fragments of the image printed on
Suspended plastic plates illuminated by a light source. Decomposed and reduced to cast shadows, the image flickers and, at the same time, confronts us with the enigma of the repetition of historical events.

Twenty years later, historical facts also interest Emmanuel van der Auwera (represented by Harlan Levey Projects in Brussels). Having collected images of the storming of the Capitol online... 1He created a Video Sculpture that is as seductive as it is unsettling. Fragmented into 30 screens, partially slashed to remove the polarizing filters, the torn image disappears and reappears between the knife-cut "comics." This flickering effect makes the image oscillate between abstraction and figuration, which speaks volumes about our blinded, oversaturated gaze, which now only sees superficially… "Screens imprison the gaze […] I want the viewer to become aware of their central role as a viewer, revealing by veiling [because] the veiled image arouses the desire to see," explains the Brussels-based artist, born in 1982, who, in his Memento series, pushes the erasure and distortion of the image even further. Playing with these distortions by overexposing an offset plate coated with photosensitive emulsion to "burn" the image, he makes it appear in a kind of ghostly state.

TRANSMUTATION

Thomas Devaux (1980), represented by La Patinoire Royale de Bruxelles, achieves a true transmutation of the image. At the boundary between photography and painting, his elegant Totems reveal shimmering gold, blue, or iridescent reflections that encase the enlarged and irradiated, and therefore invisible, image of consumer goods. This is achieved through pigment printing on dichroic glass—a precious glass with fascinating reflections. 2 The transmutation is all the more unsettling because, in addition to the image's burial, there is a shimmering effect that traps the viewer in their own image… Mingled with the barely visible fragments of photographed supermarket products, this image makes us doubly complicit victims of consumerism and voyeurism. “My work is about desire, the energies that inhabit us when we desire an object,” explains the visual artist and photographer who, playing on the mystical aura emanating from the mirrored surfaces of his glass and also from his gold-leaf-covered frames, confronts us with the deceptive mirror of consumer society, with “This obscure object of desire.” 3 "...

1 The assault on the United States Capitol by supporters of Donald Trump contesting the results of the presidential elections in Washington, January 6, 2021.
2 Dichroic glass is covered with a thin layer of quartz and metallic oxides.
3 Title borrowed by the artist from Luis Buñuel to present his Shoppers-Rays-Dichroics trilogy.

EINSPACH FINE ART & PHOTOGRAPHY (BUDAPEST): EINSPACH.COM
THE FILM GALLERY (PARIS): FILM-GALLERY.ORG
ROLF ART (BUENOS AIRES): ROLFART.COM.AR
HARLAN LEVEY PROJECTS (BRUSSELS): HL-PROJECTS.COM
THE ROYAL ICE RINK (BRUSSELS): PRVBGALLERY.COM
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