200 mouths to feed, it is not much when we know the immensity of the needs to cover, and yet already a market for the professionals of the communication, the industrialists and other wizards of the consumer society. Feeding oneself, it is said, would be a poor act, a commonplace but also a double cultural gesture of survival and sociability, a paradoxically empty and obscene act, which simultaneously indexes the real body and the social body and which sometimes means luxury, often pleasure, always necessity. Faced with this vertigo of possible images and figures, of virtual constructions, faced with all that this non-event can produce in terms of meaning, literature, studies, in short, semiologies, Claude Closky’s machine for unwinding signs intervenes at the place of a degree zero, of a physical and phantasmatic hole: the mouth as an extension of the gaze, orality and the scopic impulse. This corpus, constituted from a set of about ten hours of advertisements recorded at the same time, is thus articulated around an extremely strict working principle: sectioning the image between two precise points, between the moment when the object is brought to the mouth and when it is absorbed. Through this catalog of gestures, the absurdity of this rule of the game, Claude Closky puts into perspective, with perfect economy, the irony of his own editing exercise, the disturbance and discomfort of repetition – when every image, however insignificant, turns in on itself – and finally, the intensive, rhythmic and fictional strangeness of these déjà-vu images.
Stéphanie Moisdon

After the television news, the big-budget movie.

This video is formed by a series of still shots that constitute an album of portraits. By making freeze frames, I extracted photos from TV ads of adults and children who look us in the eye. Faced with these images, the viewer is taken hostage, as if he were part of this family, and had taken the photos himself.

Filmed in the gorges of the Haut-Allier, Le Quotidien (2022) is the portrait of a man who has chosen to live alone and away from human society, in a hut on the edge of a forest. The video maker captures his daily gestures, linked to the essential needs of the human being: drinking, eating, washing, repairing, starting over. The film is part of a more global research on the life paths of people who develop singular relationships to time, to life and to the economy.

The video Le Sorbier des oiseleurs (2018) shows a man making a birdcall and calling in the fog. The artist uses a traditional technique to make contact with bird species. He hijacks this technique to link it to a local story about how shepherds, leading their flocks through thick fog, would reassure the farms below by producing clearly identifiable sounds. This video explores in a poetic way the original methods of communication deployed in these cold lands of the Massif Central where the solitude of beings is constantly confronted with the power of the landscape and the presence of animals.