Ramy Fischler
L'image éclaire - Installation - 2015
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 17
Installation
I have elaborated a little theory, like a dreaming astrophysicist, for my own personal use. It consists in considering that the world – and our earth in particular – is not lit by a pure, homogenous white light emitted by the sun, but by sunlight that is full of images, and that this big lamp which lights up the world of humankind is rather like a cinema projector. Its light does not illuminate objects that are already here, that pre-exist, as if waiting there in the darkness; instead, beings and objects are brought by the light itself, and do not exist outside it. We are the figures projected by that film. This reverie was the basis of my first installations, comprising an object facing a film projector. Going from artworks to domestic objects, which I sometimes feel are no different, any light source, whether public lighting or the lamps in private interiors could, rather than light up the real environment, bathe it in the images of our dreams or imagination. In the course of my research, and in the lighting produced by Ramy Fischler, I found the same speculative field, but significantly updated by the most innovative technologies. It is no longer a matter of projector and projection but of a screen working recto-verso, at once as a support for animated images and as a reflector sending back the daylight. A transfer, a transformation takes place: the lights that appear in the film, which can be grasped as coming from a painting hanging on the wall, sometimes brought in by the figures, sometimes by events in the sky, become, on the back, and thanks to LED technology, pure light, reflected by the wall. Paradoxically, this light works like a cast shadow, a negative shadow, a white shadow. It faithfully accompanies the figures and the events. Already, certain domestic objects, such as the constantly working TV, with the sound off, or an aquarium, could be used as simple sources of lighting. Ramy Fischler’s lamps gave this family of objects a progeny involving crossovers with cinema, infographics, LED technology and sensors, with, as their distant ancestor, Plato’s cave. Alain Fleischer
Ramy Fischler
Ramy Fischler, Belgian designer of 37 years, has create his design studio having collaborated ten years beside Patrick Jouin, and having been a boarder of the Villa Medicis in 2010. Graduate of The National School of Industrial Design, in Paris, his practice of the design embraces all the fields of the industrial, artistic and cultural production.