Charles Gallay
Phénoménologie de la virtualité / Rencontre entre un vidéaste et un chorégraphe - Installation - 2019
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 21
Installation
Should I title this installation?
Didactically, as A Window Closed onto a World? In the edit and in the frame it refuses to be just an installation and claims a documentary dimension, too. A title like a finger pointing at the cinematographic aspect of the installation.
Or lyrically, as a Laboratory of Absurd but Salutary Questions? It is, first of all, the place of an encounter between two visual artists and, by extension, a laboratory for the encounter between different media. Facing the screens the video maker, choreographer and viewers converse, while behind the windows the results of their experiments are played out.
Or again, referentially, as Contrapposto... and all that jazz? This conveys the dialectical tone of the exchanges and the desire to subvert the codes of sculpture. But no.
Or, perhaps, enigmatically: ... To Master, or, Rather, to Know? But this title immediately poses the question of the legitimacy of recording tools with regard to the body and the meaning of “dwelling.”
In the end, none of these titles seems satisfying, for they merely offer narrow frames for the whole that a laboratory can generate. Instead, then, it is the oxymoron Phenomenology of Virtuality that will take its place on the labels, where it will attempt to effectively give a glimpse of all its rejected fellow titles.
Charles Gallay
Born in 1992, the child of the easy image and of the amniotic digital, Charles Gallay soon began investing his curiosity in the production of images. Before turning his practice towards the visual arts, he trained in cinema between 2010 and 2012 and worked in studios in Lille. In 2013 he enrolled in art school, looking for a transdisciplinary and horizontal vision of the world. Naïve and enlightened about the destiny of images, questioning the political underside of the connections between art and technology, in 2017 he worked with research laboratories. He graduated from art school in 2018 then, at Le Fresnoy – Studio National des Arts Contemporains, researched the in-between and the strange. There he is acting on his need for heterogeneous perspectives and is developing an interest in the body and its musicality.
