Ange Leccia

Since the 1980s, Ange Leccia has simultaneously reflected on objects and worked on moving images, which refer to a “non-definitive state of things, a practice of re-using pre-existing materials intended to take on other meanings” (Giorgio Verzotti). He thus draws our attention to the violence and power of certain contemporary objects derived from the technological industry by confronting cars or motorbikes, television sets or projectors… The face to face arrangement of identical objects, often linked by light, erases their functionality in favour of a reflection on their meaning and how they reflect the society that uses them. Alongside this, Ange Leccia uses videos, not in a narrative context as in a cinematographic film, but rather by looping images over and over again, thus allowing spectators to grasp the work instantly or to perceive it over time in a contemplative manner.  But we have here the contemplation of an image-movement. The cinema that, moreover, continues to be a source of inspiration, forms the very fabric of a part of his work, in which he singles out and runs again and again, without interruption, an extraordinary sequence in the history of cinema, such as an explosion taken from Pierrot le fou by Jean-Luc Godard in 1986. Whether through serenity or the violence of images, Ange Leccia questions the spectator on their meaning.

Through part of his video work, Ange Leccia explores the elements. In the 1990s, he produced works based on the repetition of natural phenomena: with La Mer (1991), he films the flow and ebb of waves on the shores of Corsica. During a stay in the island of La Reunion, he showed interest in the smoke Fumées (1995) escaping from the chimney stack of a sugar refinery. The backwash of the sea, just like the movement of smoke, creates a highly pictorial effect that we find again in Orage. The lightning flashes lit up against the dark background continues the tradition of landscape painting. The study of luminosity and the effect produced by contrasts recall the works of Le Lorrain or Joseph Vernet. However, this work is also shifting and acoustic: the spectators find themselves in a space within which they perceive the storm in its visual and auditory displays. The different parts of the screen light up in turn according to the play of the climatic elements. The luminous flickering of the lightning flashes streaking across the sky and illuminating the black clouds, the deep rumble of thunder and the crackling of pouring rain conjure up a real flood: the landscape is nothing more than light.  The visitor is at the very heart of the work, shifting in the face of this moving image. The arrangement thus places the spectator in a visual and acoustic environment, restoring in him/her the sensations of climatic outburst, the fascination for the beauty of the spectacle of nature, and the associated childhood fears. 

Sans titre of 1985 reveals another essential aspect of Ange Leccia’s work, the questioning of the objects in our society: pieces of broken blocks reveal the “snow” of a television screen in the centre of a concrete cube.  The artist uses the element of a technological universe charged with transmitting images and information. Unlike the target objective, not only the screen, mis en abîme, is mostly concealed as at the bottom of a well, but the light given off from it expresses only the emptiness and vacuity of information, and even its illusion. Here, emptiness is associated with violence both in the choice of materials that make us think of war and destruction, and in the unpleasantness of the noise. The dazzling and crackling effects conjured up by this arrangement call the spectator to question the role of the image and the media in our information society.

Source : V. D.-L., Musée d’art contemporain du Val-de-Marne