Gwendal Sartre
J'ai gravé dans ses cheveux et Conjurer l'angoisse par l'énumération - Installation - 2016
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 18
Time is there, infinitely close, silently evaluating efforts, discreet forms of anxiety, patience and passion, the sudden moments of lucidity and then (again) the doubts that haunt and encounter those who go to meet it, not knowing if it will allow them hoped-for opening that may offer a less twisted and tangled path.
Time does not withdraw or retract; it condenses, narrows, bends and extends in accordance with what it senses in the research that, in a way, Gwendal Sartre has never stopped beginning. Finally, sometimes obscurely, sometimes luminously, time gives the clue or indication or the direction to be followed for the space of this quest to line with its drapery of images and traces what is there, buried yet in line with the most remote intimacy, like a sequence of flourishes or play of signatures, that Gwendal must disentangle, without believing that he will solve the enigma and see it dissipate The essential is this, first: the characters of a very strange identification can be perceived, apprehended, grasped and extracted like legible materials (not necessarily immediately decipherable or interpretable) in a field of inscriptions or writings, whose meaning we might dream could be illuminated by a scientific or artistic formula, and that, we feel, carry in themselves and on their trajectory truth lines liable to be drawn, from one moment to the next, following this or that configuration of space and time, the intermittent forms of a destiny. These lines are no thicker than a hair, but since Oskar Schlemmer we have known that they constitute fragile but irreducible force fields allowing him to dream, for example, of this: “I would like to build a monument that is no thicker than a hair.” This wish has held up an endless promise with its paradoxical power, despite all the brutal negations endlessly produced by History.
A deep necessity drives Gwendal forward (equipped, so to speak, with no other weapons than a keen intelligence of what prescience is) and to explore those zones where writings interweave, form knots and thicknesses, but letting themselves be painted to reveal a first nether-world (which – we cannot say – could be native or very ancient, the inalienable conquest of Time over time or the perhaps untearable fabric of the most unhoped-for conjunctions) to dimensions with no assigned limits. The Swiss painter Louis Soutter wrote: “I weave grey nets of thread.”
This thread from a grey net is not cut off from the world, which must again and forever be invented, discovered and created. With Gwendal, today, it is becoming double: desire here can define its webs, its extensions and its couplings and play on them, by strings and lines weaving together the exact cadastre of a given moment of existence to be celebrated following the most secret manifestness.
Daniel Dobbels
Gwendal Sartre
2014 DNSEP Art, École supérieure d’art
et de design Marseille-Méditerranée
2016 FID Marseille - Sélection en Ecran
Parallèle « Mouvement », pour le film
Conjurer l’angoisse par l’énumération
2012 Institute Alliance Française (FIAF),
« Vive la jeunesse ! Young French Directors »
pour le film Song Song, New York,
États-Unis
2012 FID Marseille - Compétition Prix
Premier, for the film Song Song with special distinction of the jury
Production
Partners
Acknowledgments
Jean-Paul Allouche study leader ( 1st class) to the CNRS(NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH) in mathematics, Laura Haby, Baptiste Le Roi and the Fabricarium de Polythech (Lille), Professor Hugues Leroux and Université of Lille 1 to Villeneuve d' Ascq, Thierry Mouillé and the Laboratory of the Intuitions (Paris), Arnaud Petit, Boris Rogez, Anna Katharina Scheidegger, David Troadec (Engineer of Research) CNRS(NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH) and the Institute of electronics of microelectronics and nanotechnology (IEMN) to Villeneuve d' Ascq.
