notes from an occupied land…
by a lost, diaspora Tamil or a gypsy wanna-be…. this is ma journey from a land called S Lanka to occupiied land called kænədəArchive for art works
Laetitia Benat (contemporary artist)
Interview :
Laetitia Benat — interview with Pierre Leguillon
Pierre Leguillon: Can you describe the specific space your drawings open up, compared with your films or your photographs?
Laetitia Benat: Actually, it’s as if the three media—drawing, film and photography—were in the same room, and it’s their way of inhabiting this place which belongs to me and is filled with a whole lot of preoccupations that makes them different from each other. And coming back to this image of a room, I was going to say, “of a house”—they occupy the same surface, but on different floors, and for me this functions somewhat in terms of layers. I use photography to show what I see, how I see it, it’s a direct take, it’s not a set-up, it’s right in front of my eyes, I take it in the sense of capturing it. With video, it’s retranscription. A way of comprehending duration, sounds, the effects that they produce. Often the directive aspect imposed by a film—duration of view, listening, and thus, the summons to remain there without moving—makes me think that when you’re a spectator you are living what you are not living at the moment when you’re watching something. What I mean is that the visual and aural senses of the spectator are stimulated as if he were living the action (in my films it’s the inaction) although he’s fixed, focused. And that’s true as well for what is filmed: nearly the same thing happens during the editing. Drawing is on the order of speech, speech that isn’t spoken but drawn, written.
Would you say that the fantastical world of symbolists from, for example, William Blake to Odilon Redon has been a source of inspiration?
Obviously, and it’s even more than inspiration, it’s on the level of energy. When I look at William Blake’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy, for example, I plunge into them completely and I’m in a state of excitement and wonder. I’m faced with something that hypnotizes me, I’m looking at something that I don’t understand, and I can look at it for a very long time. And it isn’t so much because of what there is to see. Before my eyes, a life enters into dialogue with a part of mine, something I also don’t understand. In fact, I just let it happen, and something happens inside of me that is almost foreign to me.
Is copying your drawings right onto the surface of the wall a way for you to get away from the object, to remain in the sphere of an image destined to disappear, as if on the surface of a screen?
Yes, it’s doing something that, at that moment, is more than present, the drawing is there, but it will go away. There’s a certainty about disappearance. I’ve felt it a lot, almost as if in some tale, figures that would do anything to be beautiful, that will be admired for a time, but whose destiny is to be erased. But I’d like to come back to your use of the term “copy.” It’s true that I do a sketch on paper before, to get a sense of the scale, but what really interests me is drawing on the wall. There’s a real difference in gesture; from the horizontal of the table, used for drawing in notebooks, I go to the vertical of the wall, it’s very interesting, and there’s also the fact of drawing in a 1:1 scale, but always with the same tools and thickness of line.
In their form of “transfers” onto the wall, of “print runs” in the sense of these editions, or even when printed in magazines, these drawings seem to have neither a fixed scale nor an established support medium.
For me they have a scale and a support medium. After I let go of them, they live out their fate as reproducible, changing images. My ease in understanding this must come from my relationship to the photo, from my love for publishing, and because at the same time I have them all, or almost all, near me in my notebooks, in the way a photographer keeps his negatives. Most of the drawings remain “unfinished,” or at least certain parts in places appear to have a lot more sharpness, definition in the details…
Do these drawings sometimes start with photographs, and more generally, what relationship do they have to your images?
Generally I don’t very often draw starting with photographs, or if I do, it isn’t from photograph-documents made for that reason. I mean, sometimes I’ve posed for a photo myself, in place of a model. But as a whole, it’s more often a question of mental drawings, done like that, which have, as I’ve said, more to do with writing. But I also like to do drawings as studies, to subject myself to such practical experience. I put myself in front of a plant and I draw. And even if I don’t make a direct copy of something, I have plenty of photocopies, a sort of image bank, made up of works of art from every period and of every character—drawing, painting and a lot of sculpture.
Like the myth in which Daphne is changed into a laurel to escape Apollo’s desire, plant motifs in your drawings are often associated with the female body. How would you interpret this recurring figure?
I don’t want to interpret what I do, but it’s true that I love the representations of this myth; recently I was looking again at the one by Bernini, which I think is fabulous, and I said to myself that I really wanted to go to Rome. — Paris, August 06
***********************************************************
Best known for her video works and photo series, Laetitia BENAT lets us see fragments of her inner world through her works, which are like windows opening onto intimate landscapes. Her series of images are like pictures from a movie pinned at the front door of a movie theatre: stories barely started from which the viewer can imagine his own film.
For her first solo show in France and her first venue in a French gallery, Laetitia BENAT presents her drawings for the first time, which have been transferred to the walls for the occasion. Often pulled from her private notebooks, her drawings are where the artist speaks most: they replace writing, just as video and photography replaces the gaze. Her mural designs are the transposition of her sketchbooks into space where the strolling of the viewers replaces the turning of their pages. With their subtle, freehand lines, they conserve all the spirit and spontaneity of small scale formats. Sketches of flowers, animals and the female body echo each other; the pure and refined drawings focus on a few details, enough to evoke a legible response. These evanescent traces of mental images act like a condensation of Laetitia Benat’s imaginative world on walls. The artist’s thoughts draw us towards the fantastic, mingled with a feeling of suspended time they create an ominous calm in her apparently fragile universe.
This oscillation between anxiety and serenity is particularly striking in Laetitia BENAT’s video works. Nearby (2000, 20’9″) is a series of round trips between an interior space (a room with white walls where girls loiter) and an outside space (mild landscapes). Black Sanna (2002, 6’433) is the fantastic tale, shot in black and white, which seems to portray a witches’ coven. Halvimar (2002, 22’70″), titled after heroine, could be the sequel to Black Sanna, or perhaps the prequel. A young man and a young woman wander, disembodied, through a castle. Blood (2002, 2’40″)and MC/CW (2000, 1’25″) are animated videos. Laetitia BENAT uses the portrait of a woman as a base, which she then animates while smudging the motifs with something resembling dirt or blood.
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http://www.cosmicgalerie.com/en/pages/artistes.php?name=laetitiabenat
Laetitia Benat (contemporary artist)
Interview :
Laetitia Benat — interview with Pierre Leguillon
Pierre Leguillon: Can you describe the specific space your drawings open up, compared with your films or your photographs?
Laetitia Benat: Actually, it’s as if the three media—drawing, film and photography—were in the same room, and it’s their way of inhabiting this place which belongs to me and is filled with a whole lot of preoccupations that makes them different from each other. And coming back to this image of a room, I was going to say, “of a house”—they occupy the same surface, but on different floors, and for me this functions somewhat in terms of layers. I use photography to show what I see, how I see it, it’s a direct take, it’s not a set-up, it’s right in front of my eyes, I take it in the sense of capturing it. With video, it’s retranscription. A way of comprehending duration, sounds, the effects that they produce. Often the directive aspect imposed by a film—duration of view, listening, and thus, the summons to remain there without moving—makes me think that when you’re a spectator you are living what you are not living at the moment when you’re watching something. What I mean is that the visual and aural senses of the spectator are stimulated as if he were living the action (in my films it’s the inaction) although he’s fixed, focused. And that’s true as well for what is filmed: nearly the same thing happens during the editing. Drawing is on the order of speech, speech that isn’t spoken but drawn, written.
Would you say that the fantastical world of symbolists from, for example, William Blake to Odilon Redon has been a source of inspiration?
Obviously, and it’s even more than inspiration, it’s on the level of energy. When I look at William Blake’s illustrations for The Divine Comedy, for example, I plunge into them completely and I’m in a state of excitement and wonder. I’m faced with something that hypnotizes me, I’m looking at something that I don’t understand, and I can look at it for a very long time. And it isn’t so much because of what there is to see. Before my eyes, a life enters into dialogue with a part of mine, something I also don’t understand. In fact, I just let it happen, and something happens inside of me that is almost foreign to me.
Is copying your drawings right onto the surface of the wall a way for you to get away from the object, to remain in the sphere of an image destined to disappear, as if on the surface of a screen?
Yes, it’s doing something that, at that moment, is more than present, the drawing is there, but it will go away. There’s a certainty about disappearance. I’ve felt it a lot, almost as if in some tale, figures that would do anything to be beautiful, that will be admired for a time, but whose destiny is to be erased. But I’d like to come back to your use of the term “copy.” It’s true that I do a sketch on paper before, to get a sense of the scale, but what really interests me is drawing on the wall. There’s a real difference in gesture; from the horizontal of the table, used for drawing in notebooks, I go to the vertical of the wall, it’s very interesting, and there’s also the fact of drawing in a 1:1 scale, but always with the same tools and thickness of line.
In their form of “transfers” onto the wall, of “print runs” in the sense of these editions, or even when printed in magazines, these drawings seem to have neither a fixed scale nor an established support medium.
For me they have a scale and a support medium. After I let go of them, they live out their fate as reproducible, changing images. My ease in understanding this must come from my relationship to the photo, from my love for publishing, and because at the same time I have them all, or almost all, near me in my notebooks, in the way a photographer keeps his negatives. Most of the drawings remain “unfinished,” or at least certain parts in places appear to have a lot more sharpness, definition in the details…
Do these drawings sometimes start with photographs, and more generally, what relationship do they have to your images?
Generally I don’t very often draw starting with photographs, or if I do, it isn’t from photograph-documents made for that reason. I mean, sometimes I’ve posed for a photo myself, in place of a model. But as a whole, it’s more often a question of mental drawings, done like that, which have, as I’ve said, more to do with writing. But I also like to do drawings as studies, to subject myself to such practical experience. I put myself in front of a plant and I draw. And even if I don’t make a direct copy of something, I have plenty of photocopies, a sort of image bank, made up of works of art from every period and of every character—drawing, painting and a lot of sculpture.
Like the myth in which Daphne is changed into a laurel to escape Apollo’s desire, plant motifs in your drawings are often associated with the female body. How would you interpret this recurring figure?
I don’t want to interpret what I do, but it’s true that I love the representations of this myth; recently I was looking again at the one by Bernini, which I think is fabulous, and I said to myself that I really wanted to go to Rome. — Paris, August 06
***********************************************************
Best known for her video works and photo series, Laetitia BENAT lets us see fragments of her inner world through her works, which are like windows opening onto intimate landscapes. Her series of images are like pictures from a movie pinned at the front door of a movie theatre: stories barely started from which the viewer can imagine his own film.
For her first solo show in France and her first venue in a French gallery, Laetitia BENAT presents her drawings for the first time, which have been transferred to the walls for the occasion. Often pulled from her private notebooks, her drawings are where the artist speaks most: they replace writing, just as video and photography replaces the gaze. Her mural designs are the transposition of her sketchbooks into space where the strolling of the viewers replaces the turning of their pages. With their subtle, freehand lines, they conserve all the spirit and spontaneity of small scale formats. Sketches of flowers, animals and the female body echo each other; the pure and refined drawings focus on a few details, enough to evoke a legible response. These evanescent traces of mental images act like a condensation of Laetitia Benat’s imaginative world on walls. The artist’s thoughts draw us towards the fantastic, mingled with a feeling of suspended time they create an ominous calm in her apparently fragile universe.
This oscillation between anxiety and serenity is particularly striking in Laetitia BENAT’s video works. Nearby (2000, 20’9″) is a series of round trips between an interior space (a room with white walls where girls loiter) and an outside space (mild landscapes). Black Sanna (2002, 6’433) is the fantastic tale, shot in black and white, which seems to portray a witches’ coven. Halvimar (2002, 22’70″), titled after heroine, could be the sequel to Black Sanna, or perhaps the prequel. A young man and a young woman wander, disembodied, through a castle. Blood (2002, 2’40″)and MC/CW (2000, 1’25″) are animated videos. Laetitia BENAT uses the portrait of a woman as a base, which she then animates while smudging the motifs with something resembling dirt or blood.
**************************************************************************8
http://www.cosmicgalerie.com/en/pages/artistes.php?name=laetitiabenat
Vanity or the Source of Evil [by Giovanni Segantini ] – 1897
La Vanità Fonte del Male (1897)
Giovanni Segantini
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Segantini
[while reading herman hesse's book 'peter mackenzine' or something.. asked indra to search for this artist.. she sent it searched: Apr 20, 2008 at 8:03 PM ]
*The Choir of Sant Antonio, 1879
Marc Chagall’s art works
encyclopedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Chagall
art works:
http://www.artsoho.net/chagall.htm
*The Birthday (1915)
[sept 6, 2008]
"Throw away the keys" ]art piece[
“Three things cannot long stay hidden: the sun, the moon and the truth”.
Buddha
artwork by rebeccashrimpton
