Reflection on the Work

The Memory of a Certain Image…

Reflections on the Work of Annabel Aoun Blanco

Annabel Aoun Blanco’s work does not easily fit into the portrait genre, to which one is initially tempted to relate it when contemplating her photographic paintings or videos. Forms of faces appear, as imprecise as imprints or as livid as casts, impressive in their expression and alluring due to the enigma they conceal, as if they literally illustrated Pascal’s famous thought: A portrait carries absence and presence, pleasure and displeasure1. Thus, the models used to create these portraits seem more imaginary than real; they are masks reminiscent alternately of specters, mummies, ghosts depending on the treatment undergone before the shoots, or sometimes real faces freed from their personality, as in the Avatars series.

The raison d’être of such portraits is not the display of an identity, but rather the highlighting of the mode of appearance of the figures they reveal, the portrait having no other purpose than to reflect portraiture in its complexity and its relationship with memory. What particularly interests Annabel Aoun Blanco is remembrance, the way the image of portraits, fixed or animated, recalls this inconstant and fragile representation aimed at in the act of remembering. That is why living models appear only at the very beginning of her work, fading away to make room for direct imprints, masks, and subjects that are already images.

The entire artistic apparatus implemented by the artist is oriented towards a phenomenology of remembrance, with photography or video reporting, according to a variable regime of visibility, the fleeting impressions captured during acts of recollection. At least two modalities of appearance and disappearance of these fleeting images can be observed.

First, emergence or burial. In the series titled Contemporary Dance II, figures are immersed in a pool of milk and only their limbs or a part of their face appear on the floating surface. In other more recent series, masks are camouflaged by too much or too little light (photo series: Caresses, Eloigne moi de toi, and Descadres, for example) or obliterated by various materials: ash, sand, charcoal powder, veiling. In each case, access to the image emerges in the infinitesimal moment when the subject’s presence is about to appear or be swallowed up in the monochrome of oblivion. These surreptitious appearances are not unrelated to the mythical representation of Ophelia’s death that has haunted the history of painting: a secondary character in Hamlet’s play, her disappearance recounted by the queen (Act IV, sc.7) marks, in its description, that fatal moment when the princess will cease to be visible. The fascination with the boundary between life and death, appearance and disappearance, and the presence that gives way to memory has provided an abundant source of inspiration for painters, leading Rimbaud to say:

For more than a thousand years, sad Ophelia
Passes, a white ghost, on the long black river2

All of Annabel Aoun Blanco’s creative attention focuses on this metaphorical passage from white to black, as indicated by the central image titled: ∞ (infinity).

The other recurring modality of appearance and disappearance of the memory-image consists of a freeze-frame, a fixation on an almost discernible face that nevertheless bears the marks of its disintegration. The effect produced by this vision differs significantly depending on the medium used.

In some photographs, the fixation focuses on the appearance of a face bearing the marks of time. The sequence titled ‘zoome’ presents the burial of the same face imprint, at two different moments, in charcoal powder: from one to the other, a progression in the devastation of the features is noted. The image titled ‘dézoome’ isolates the circle of the magnifying glass centered in the middle of a ravaged face, plunged into darkness to signify its journey towards death. The artistic elaboration of this fixation on disappearing appearances interprets, in a fascinating way, the notion of mneme that psychology used to designate the organic trace that would be the material basis of memory.

With videos, this fixation lasts for an infinitesimal eclipse where disappearance occurs almost immediately after appearance in the perpetual motion of a cinematic loop. In the video titled SNEIVER, which lasts ten seconds, barely one second is reserved for the appearance of the face. In the one titled REVIENS, the gray shadow of the face brightens for a fraction of a second before its features are obscured by a gust of ash. In still others, particularly REVIENS II and III, an identical event occurs under the action of intermittent lighting.

In fact, the two mediums used in each series evolve both in parallel and in opposite directions: progressively, photographic fixation moves towards a frozen kineticism, produced by the visible traces of the artist’s gestures, while video tends towards the vision of a lasting snapshot. This inverse dynamic that gradually establishes itself forms the back and forth between appearance and disappearance that is at the heart of the work.

The video loops compulsively repeat an endlessly unfulfilled desire to see what, moreover, the photographic lens manages to capture; but what is thus captured appears to the eye under the aspects of devastation and decomposition. The memory-image perishes in the irreversibility of time, just as the image of Eurydice perishes under the unfortunate gaze of Orpheus, turning back too soon, upon leaving the Underworld, to ascertain his wife’s presence. It was too soon, but suddenly too late in the one-dimensional flow of time. The beautiful dryad transformed into a memory itself destined for disappearance, yet revived in Orpheus’s lyre, which has inspired artists and poets since Antiquity.

That mythical references seamlessly impose themselves when considering Annabel Aoun Blanco’s creations sufficiently demonstrates the emotional power that runs through the entire body of work. Firstly, through her personal involvement in the titles she chooses for each of her images, which resonate like commands she would issue to a vanished person (REVIENS-REVIENS XXVIII, Eloigne moi de toi, DETENDS-TOI) or perhaps commands addressed to herself (zoome, dézoome…). Secondly, through the understanding of the link that unites the subjects of her artistic practice with the nature of the mediums she uses: the aesthetic redefinition of imprint and trace, the photographic grain that perfectly associates with the asperities of the memory-image, and video sequences that stubbornly attempt to climb back against time. Finally, through the gentle melancholy released throughout the images by this call for time to return, which seems to develop the finale of Du Côté de chez Swann: The memory of a certain image is but the regret of a certain moment.

These few reflections only partially open up the scope of an admirable and ambitious work, nourished by the efforts of voluntary memory and the tremors of involuntary memory, constructed like a novel in search of its completion, the work of a lifetime.

Robert Pujade
March 21, 2018

1 Pascal, Pensée 678, Ed Brunschvicg.

2 Arthur Rimbaud, La Mort d’Ophélie.