Laurent Fiévet

Made up of a set of more than two hundred fifty short video loops made from extracts from films of different genres, periods and origins, having in common the evocation of vases, jars, flasks, teapots, figurines or broken trinkets, the Breaking up series proceeds, in the same way as the Swing High, Swing Low (2012-2014) and Whistle (2012-2025) series, by inventory logic. or collectible, drawing its substance largely from all of the sound cinematographic production of the 20th and 21st centuries.

Thanks to its different effects of back and forth in film continuity and its games of reiteration favoring a multiplication of incidents, each of the montages follows a double movement of destruction and reconstitution of the key objects in the selected sequences, which crystallizes the precise moment of its pulverization, whether this is due to an intention, a clumsiness or an unforeseen event, following a fall or the impact of a body, another object, or even a projectile.

This double principle both directly echoes the process of fragmentation of the film carried out by editing, retaining only selected extracts from it, and the faculty of the spectator’s memory to restore it or not, even partially, from the images and sounds exhibited. As such, each of the works in the series offers an illustration of the viewer’s ability to redeploy the filmic source from the reinvented object or the failure, partial or total, of this mechanism, in the same way as the montages of the series On the Tip of the Tongue (2015) could be for the circumvented songs.

The destruction that punctuates the series underlines the impact on the film works of the editing work carried out and the propensity of the latter to transform the sources into new entities. By inviting the observer to continually transit between effects of atomization or re-materialization, Breaking up comments on the nature of the process of appropriation at work in the artistic proposition and the formal shifts provoked in their videographic reinvention.

Confronted in the same space, the different video loops orchestrate a visual and sound score which introduces different resonance and repeat effects. The viewer is invited to consider them in turn as independent motifs or constituent elements of a vast installation, like the objects and their debris in each of the assembled montages. By inviting gaze and ear to flutter within the system, to move from one loop to another, the installation invites the visitor to appreciate the series in its entirety or in a more fragmentary mode, encouraging them to reproduce, in the context of the installation which articulates them, the principle of concentration proposed within the films on the different broken objects.

Thus, whether it arises from a perception linked to the installation or to each of the loops of the series, the visual and sonic apprehension of Breaking up transits in turn between global and partial perception, between the integrity of a posed entity and its circumscription in the form of a fragment, between a chosen object and one of its motifs. It is continually based on games of opening and re-closing the field in a double movement which has as much to do with an effect of focal length (which is regularly renewed by the consecutive changes in scale of shots within each of the montages of the series) as with the back and forth movement (particularly specific to the movements of objects and characters in the field or that of visitors in the exhibition space). This mobility is not foreign to that deployed by the analysis and reflects its way of developing a reflection and of partly reinventing its object from details retained in the vast visual and sound materiality that the film or video work offers. It celebrates his power of creativity while exposing the nature of his physical and intellectual mechanisms.