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BERTRAND LAMARCHE
LES SOUFFLES
2015, 11’, colour, sound, film video HD, edition of 4 + 1AP
The film Les souffles is one of Bertrand
Lamarche’s works relative to his interest in
recorded music and sound and how to show
the process of listening. In several of his
installations or films, Bertrand Lamarche
uses turntables in some ‘mises en scenes’
where the records, the turntables and the
sounds are equally important. They are all
used to pinpoint the idea that space and
time can be distorted or twisted by using and
playing with the reality and the image of a
spiral. The film Les souffles shows a close up
on a phonograph that reads a record which
has been previously covered with wax. The
needle of the machine reads the record and
a thin thread of wax grows in a constant and
moving shape that breaks while too long
and too fragile to resist the rotation of the
turntable. It is then swallowed by a vacuum
cleaner that one can just hear. This thread is
eventually the negative figure of a recorded
song that one can see but not hear. It shows
convulsive disorder, like if the timeline
organised in the constant spiral of the record
had become a complete chaos.
Exploiting spatial and distortions,
Bertrand Lamarche (1966, Paris,
France) proposes a group of sculptural
hypotheses that are at once ecstatic
and conceptual. His work is rooted
in the amplification and the potential
for speculation of figures that have
featured regularly in his oeuvre for
nearly 20 years: the city of Nancy,
pop music, meteorology, giant
umbellifers, revolving lights, tunnels,
record decks. A large proportion of
his oeuvre is characterized by a desire
for subjectivation and appropriation,
sometimes almost demiurgic, of various
areas or figures of reality. Through
modelling, the artist takes over these
entities, developing a set of propositions
that unsettle viewers because they
are generated by looping, or present a
mise-en-abyme, or result from a loss of
reference points in space-time and/or
distortions in scale. Lamarche lives and
works in Paris.
Presented by
— Galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris