Celeste e verde
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Cinematek Brussels 2013
INSTALLATION
Celeste e verde (blue and green) is the title that Michelangelo Antonioni originally chose for his first colour film: Deserto Rosso.
This exhibit by the artist Michel Lorand is inspired in the film’s visual approach, but above all in its conceptual framework. Drawing on Antonioni’s reflections on his own work, many analyses of the film highlight the director’s bid to explore the experience of absence, emptiness and loss, in a philosophical as opposed to psychological sense. The film, therefore, explores the absence of attachments to the world, the problems derived from the lack of a sense of reality and of the loss of one’s own identity. “How to live?” and “what to look at? are the fundamental questions posed in the film. For Antonioni the challenge is not just to state “emptiness” but also rather to construct a veritable aesthetic of emptying, the essential element of his poetic art.
Michel Lorand’s work continues in this spirit. The images freely taken from the film are reproduced in different formats, seen from wide angles and in panoramic views, the selection, repetition, assembly, and sequencing displaying the same search for effacement and disappearance. The removal of all human presence from the images on show poses questions about time, the visible or invisible future of things and beings, their capacity to become strangers to the world.
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