Warren, a Quarter of a Second in Cinemascope , 2007
enamelled earthenware, 7 pieces 50 x 35 X 50 cm
recycled rubber, 800 x 200 cm
Installation view, Dynasty, Palais de Tokyo, Paris (11 June - 5 September 2010)

These seven earthenware portraits are of actor Warren Oates – a dedicated player of supporting part and anti-heroes – in a scene from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1969). Despite its tangibility here, this duplicated, strangely familiar face remains just an “image” tucked away somewhere in our cinema memory. The mannered character of these ceramic pieces – they remind us of Mexican popular craft – is in marked contrast with the coarseness of the rubber mat cut out in such a way to suggest a projector cone or road. The figures are compressed vertically and this is because they are the transposition of seven frames – about a quarter of a second – in cinemascope., a format rendered panoramic via projection through an anamorphic lens. The infinitely small differences between each portrait give material expression to a slow-motion effect and create a transition from the temporal to the spatial dimension. This dual process – compression of the image and dilation of its time frame – highlights the fact that representation is always a construct within a manipulable materiality. Because it conceals the frame/window, cinemascope has been especially suited to the shooting of group scenes and landscapes in westerns and road movies. Oates was part of the twilight of these genres when, in late 1960s context of real challenge to the “American dream”, they began to have doubts about their way of embracing the world. These portraits, then, appear as ghosts, just as in the zombie movies that came to haunt America at the same period.

Text by Pedro Morais in Bettina Samson, Laps & Strates, edition Adera, Lyon, 2009.

 

 

 

 

© NETTIE HORN