Bienvenue sur le site de Heure Exquise

With a slight feeling of giddiness, I am looking through the theme index, from Surrealism to Souvenirs, through the variety of Music and onto AIDS, from Immigration to Madness, from Experimental to Reading, from Garden to Racism and onto Work. The work that has gone into preparing the proposals with an aim at interesting a wider public than that of traditional video art is obvious. In the catalogue, the video is presented in its two historical aspects : that of the articulation of languages in which effects, metamorphosis, the adventure of forms are the core of artistic creation (which does not therefore pursue an impression of reality) and that of documentation, personal, cultural, or social. The two tendencies escape in any event from an obsession with fiction; both use specific qualities of video, even if different : for video art there is the capacity of playing with forms, colours, time and space; for the documentaries, there is the intimacy and the lightness of the tool, its simplicity in everyday use, its easy to manipulate universality.

Sometimes these two tendencies meet, and the formula "creative documentary" is the result. At other times, more or less fortunately, they remain separate. But there are realms where they meet, as in video-dance, portraits, or travel diaries.

I am looking at the new tapes : delicate variations of electronic canvases, moving frescos, changing lights by the window of an apartment, contrasts in grey as in certain photographs, or certain engravings; portraits of real or virtual bodies; portraits of inanimate bodies, destroyed by war; the camera which spies, accompanies, witnesses, questions; electronically repainted landscapes; the transformations of old films into fragments, personal souvenirs often interlaced with historical events... A whole variety of ways of looking at things in which I recognize the acute curiosity of "Heure Exquise !".