David Lamelas

Born in 1946 in Buenos Aires (AR)
Lives and works between New York (US), Los Angeles, California (US) and Paris (FR)

  

Projection

1967
Installation
Two 16 mm projectors
Purchased in: 2004

Pared Doblada
Projection

After going in for sculpture back in the early 1960s, David Lamelas later turned to a critique of the media. While looking at formal identities as diverse as performance art and fiction films, his work is anchored in his research into space and language. Projection follows on seamlessly from the early sculptures, except that this installation, first produced in 1967 and reactivated in 2004, dematerializes the plastic form. In an exhibition space thus turned into a special kind of projection room, two 16mm film projectors are placed back to back. First one emits a powerful beam of light that disturbs the viewer’s retinal perception before being drowned in natural light.

The second then projects the same imageless film onto a wall that echoes the traditional projection screen. So the other anticipates on this by including the viewer in the wires of the projection machinery. Now it is like the degree zero of cinematographic artifice, by denudation of this machinery and of the power of visual abstraction that it stimulates, to the rhythmic sound of the film passing through the projector. And this functions in a way comparable to Expanded Cinema such as the New York movie avant-gardes began to experiment in the early sixties. This came after Man Ray and his ‘Bal Blanc’ of 1930, in which he projected a colourised version of the Méliès film onto the guests (dressed in white) of the Pecci-Blunts at their home in Paris. With Lamelas, the idea is also to denude the form, to liken it to some other and propose a third: a sculpture of space. Meanwhile, Projection announces the artist’s later works on modes of coding information; this installation also addresses the absence of clues on the projected film. In response to this, the viewer’s mental presence is solicited (in addition to his physical inclusion): the viewer has to invent images to fill the blank projection surface. It may well be the fragmentation of vision in this age of mass technology, and the derealization they provoke, that are at issue here. And this then involves a game of formal deconstruction and reconstruction, for which concept and percept go hand in hand.

^{Frédéric Maufras}

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