The Man With the Hat (L’homme au chapeau)
2015
5-copy series of 10 backlit photographs: 23.5 x 18.5cm
A man by the sea, a seagull swirls around him. He approaches the camera.
In this work, the artist has randomly extracted ten images from an amateur film. Just as in Trois secondes et deux images, it stops the cinematographic movement, breaks the “constitutive” style of film and leans towards the “constative” strength of photography.
This notion is underlined by the highly contrasted images, printed on thick paper, backlit and framed in velvet-trimmed thick black frames. The man’s traits disappear and he becomes a spectre animated by an artificial sun. The images became shadow puppets. The photogramme becomes a fetishised object.