“It’s an electric world on which we lift the veil. A world of yesterday, filled with dust.” (Benoît Labourdette)

Abstraction, narration and pattern

Man needs stories to be told in order to exert his symbolization process and thus give meaning to his experiences, to construct his own vision of the world.

Many types of works, such as oral and written narratives or painting, use storytelling, linear or not, to take the viewer by the hand and engage him or her in a story.

Abstraction, i. e. the project of direct and unique contact with the sensitive part of the spectator at work, does not mobilize the narrative process explicitly. Abstraction postulates that there is more than “stories”, that there is also the possibility of sharing a symbolization process whose essence is in the senses. It is the affirmation and quest, for the spectator of abstract works, of an opening chosen to the unconscious, to the non sense, that will allow him to touch deeper zones in him. This requires the spectator to let go of the hold, a form of meditation, to let the meaning fade away.

Music, certain forms of sculpture, architecture or the contemplation of nature for example are practices of the relationship between being and abstraction. In this case, what is a link is no longer a narrative axis, it is a pattern. The chorus, the theme, the repetition of the same. Columns in architecture, rhythm of forms or sounds, musical phrases, symmetries in nature, etc. It is therefore through a rhythm, given by the repetition and declination of a pattern that a deep, meditative form of symbolization is implemented.

Here, in the context of a film, which arouses a priori the expectation of a narrative (except if it is shown in a loop in an exhibition for example), there is a motif, in the visual and in the words, which are like so many fragments of stories. My proposal is mixed: abstract at first glance, but proposing to project his own story. Here the project is that the story being told is that of the viewer, which reveals itself to him in the interstices of parcel narrative patterns.