La vue et la voix ne lui étaient pas étrangères
February 19 - March 18, 2000
From February 19 to March 18, Mario Côté is visiting Galerie Trois Points to present his latest production.
Since 1996, Mario Côté has been studying Dziga Vertov’s The Man with the Camera (1928), the founding film of the experimentation of moving images. By observing the latter in video copy, he was able to detect invisible images in normal viewing. Between two shots, the artist has indeed identified on the film handwritten signs sometimes abstract, sometimes readable. Starting point for the paintings, these inscriptions were the subject of freeze frames and color photographic enlargements. In the series of five paintings proposed here, Côté seeks to make visible the moment when the lens of the camera appears in close-up and occupies the entire surface of the image. Perceptible during the formation of the image, spots, collages and wear of the film have been for the artist productive new meanings as the final semicircle, which relaunches to other avenues the metaphor of cine-eye dear to Vertov.
In this corpus, Côté also explores the higher or lower spaces invested by color and collage of photographs. Borrowed from the process of forming television images, these bands called “lines of the vertical interval test signal” are generally reserved for the encoding of information such as subtitles for the hearing-impaired, the identification of the contents of a television. show, time, etc. These bands electronic devices allow the artist to juxtapose images that come to interrogate this place of hidden information.
In this perspective, the painting becomes for Mario Côté a space where the images are put to the test, an event where the color is transformed into a totality of images.