Press Release Engl

Xavier Veilhan / Light Machines
from April 30th through June 12th 2004
A show at the Fondation Vasarely, Aix-en-Provence

The artist presents a series of recent artworks, the Light Machines, six of them being shown together for the first time in the same exhibition space. For the Frac, the idea is, within the context of its mission of dissemination, to propose to an artist of its collection, to develop a specific project for a given place. The Fondation Vasarely, a patrimonial and an art total site, is the venue for this exhibition which echoes the researches of the artist who created and designed this site.
Each piece of the Light Machines series presents itself like a large-sized picture made up of lamps placed all over its surface. Using a digital data transfer system for an analogical diffusion, the light screens of the Light Machines show short film sequences realized by the artist. When approaching the surface composed of alternate light and dark dots, the motives remain abstract.
This makes the narration observable only from a distance. In this respect, Xavier Veilhan offers the visitor both a visual and physical experience. The Light Machines "alternate figurative and abstract images, the nature of which is questioned by the physical relation to them (the distance from the machine, the heat diffused). A bright image (a thousand lamps are lit) equals a heatwave of 10 000 Watts: it is as much through these sensations than through vision that rythm is created". Here, a mechanical process makes the form appear. Any mark of gesture has disappeared, forms are smooth, the image is depersonalized. "What I represent is often closer to the generic pattern than to any particular reality. Creating a picture which would be as wide as the field of the word it defines". Actually, the artist uses standard images without particular identity and turns them into the mere idea of what they represent.
The process of breaking up the image goes together with a special treatment of narration. The story of the Light Machines remains quite enigmatic. The furtive appearances of motives, movements, make way for the imagination of the visitor. "The narration is all the richer than it is open and incomplete: one visits a story the way one visits an exhibition. As always, several reasons coexist: the diffusion device is specific enough to have images which have become generic - like a road unwiding - totally renewed. I am interested in associating the strangeness of a new technique with the familiarity of ‘déjà vu’ images".
At the Fondation Vasarely, this process of breaking up the image echoes the researches made in the fifties by the artists of the Op Art and Kinetics, in the fields of optics and the use of beams of light. Yet, beyond these specific artistic researches, Xavier Veilhan keeps questioning, through his works, the foundations of Modernity and of the industrial society. "The boom of the industrial society of the XIXth and XXth centuries (vehicles, production, cinema and speed) nurtures my work more than any art movement".