Projects Afterglow

 

At every moment of our lives, we are intertwined with all of humanity’s past, and that past is essentially language. We live against a background of incessant choir and, of course, it is possible to imagine the presence of all that has ever been said and written as a single syllable crossing all ages. As W.S. Merwin puts it in his poem Utterance, “the echo of all that has already been said” surrounds us constantly, reality is encrypted with language.

The Afterglow exhibition will be the culmination of long researches from which I will assemble various symbols, imagery and texts from very distant times. To do this, I will use different mediums such as printing, engraving, drawing, video and mixed media. Like echoes, my works will show and highlight the links that exist between these isolated temporalities. As in my previous series Foundation and Atlas, I will draw on various fields such as history, alchemy, literature, psychology and astrophysics. Like a long sentence, the projects of this exhibition will stretch on the walls as a single voice in a time that will be abolished.

Afterglow will bring together the Hurrian songs, the alchemical text Corpus Hermeticum, the writings of Carl Gustav Jung The Seven Sermons to the Dead and The Red Book, and recent CERN scientific publications. There are still three major works to be completed to finalize this series: Time Crystal, Abraxas and Utterance will be added to five other works already produced.

On a 4.5 x 2.5 ft handmade paper, the Time Crystalproject represents the cosmic microwave background and will be created from the oldest melody ever written in cuneiform, the Hurrian songs. The initial stages of this project have already been completed: over the past year, I have copied the 372 symbols from the original clay tablet to the computer. The symbols were duplicated and arranged to suggest the primordial explosion of the Big Bang (image). The remaining steps are to laser engrave each of the symbols on an acrylic plate. Then, a handmade and still wet paper will be placed on the engraved surface and will be molded in the hollow of the symbols. Thus, the cuneiform script will be embossed on the paper, white on a white background. With Time Crystal, the first moments of the universe will meet here the Hurrian songs, the first music ever written and performed over 3400 years ago, preludes to our civilization.

The Abraxas project was also drawn on the computer during the past year. In this work, the colored halo is in fact the result of a scientific experiment in quantum mechanics: a laser beam showing a superposition of two entangled photons (image). Below is the Klein bottle, in mathematics this volume has a surface that is both interior and exterior, therefore infinite. All around, the extract The Seven Sermons to the Dead by Carl Gustave Jung has been copied and superimposed. This project will be laser engraved on three panes (24 x 36 in. Diamond type), which will then be superimposed and assembled. On each window will be an element, the text of Jung first, the colored halo second and the bottle of Klein on the last. The panes will be assembled with small hooks at the four corners, all on a black painted aluminum plate. In Jung’s text, the creature named Abraxas embodies the union of opposites. It somehow prefigures the principle of superimposition in quantum mechanics according to which, a particle can have contradictory states or be in several places simultaneously.

Utterance is a four-minute video projected onto a wall and 207 coded transcriptions of the poem by W. S. Merwin that will be at the center of the space. At the beginning of the video, separated into three sequences, pages of books take flight in the background near a frozen lake under a precipice. Then on a ground, a liquid metal which covers a book undulates under the effect of three sudden bursts. Finally, in front of the same lake, but in the foreground this time, pages of books fall in slow motion. In this project, the first sequence which has been reversed and the last represent the two possible directions of time in quantum mechanic, back to the past and toward the future. The second sequence refers to the basic elements in alchemy: salt, sulfide and mercury, which together form the Great Work. Even today, physics is in a quest for unification that goes back to the time of alchemy and refers to this millennial desire to bring heaven to earth, the body of the spirit. To create the coded transcriptions of the poem Utterance, twenty-six still images from the third sequence will be selected to create a lexicon. These images, showing the falling pages, will be traced and each will be matched to a letter of the alphabet. It is with this lexicon that I will transcribe the poem by W.S. Merwin on a 12 x 18 cm paper. A print run of 207 copies will be made which corresponds to the number of letters in the poem.