World Water Joy : A Work in Progress - Participating Artist - Ange Leccia

ANGE LECCIA
La Mer, 2001
Installation, silent, dvd, 27’32’’
Courtesy Almine Rech Gallery, Paris/Brussels

La Mer, the sea, is filmed in a single steady frame from a perpendicular plan, creating continuously changing abstract images. One could linger watching them for hours, as in a Zen meditation practice. Projected vertically on the wall, waves actually loose their familiar aspect, producing a feeling of estrangement that amplifies their beauty. They become magic fluorescences, infinitely recurring in a continuous loop that underlines the materiality of video images and their vivid relation with paintings.

 

Recurrent issue in the works of the artist, La Mer, is as well the subject of a video shot in 1991 in Corsica, is a vertical projection of waves endlessly breaking on the beach in Nonza. While shooting, the artist turned his camera to capture the image from above. The constant vertical onslaughts of the surf create a sense of breathing in and out. Playing with the sinuous, luminous, graphic patterns of the moving water, foam and sand, and with tones of black and white, the camera turns the waves into mountains, depth into solidity, figurative into abstract. This video is part of a more contemplative investigation of the landscape and the elements which the artist has been conducting for some time. the sea, is filmed here in a single steady frame from a perpendicular plan, creating continuously changing abstract images. One could linger watching them for hours, as in a Zen meditation practice. Projected vertically on the wall, waves actually loose their familiar aspect, producing a feeling of estrangement that amplifies their beauty.

Born in 1952 in Minerbio (Corsica), Ange Leccia lives and works in Paris. A leading figure in French art, he rose to prominence in the 1980s for his “arrangements,” installations of objects that are generally placed to face each other. In the 1990s, he developed a specific, consistent working method, creating visual devices with a poetic dimension that weaves new ties between video and painting. He is professor at the Ecole supérieure de Beaux-Arts de Cergy-Pontoise (ENSAPC) and directs research for young artists at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. His works has been shown at Musée Rodin, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, Takanawa and Seibu Museum, Tokyo; Sydney Biennial; Musée du Louvre, Paris.