The work by Guillaume Gattier resorts to revealing processes, the elements on display are activated, leaving a residual mark as a result of the gesture. It was mostly obvious when the artist displayed 5,000 matches in circle on a wood sheet on which, after lighting the first match, succeeded a linking of consequences which marks were left on it. These marks are the only record of this activation in which the process can be discovered after a reading effort.

By turning the pages of the book Impression d’impact, the reader goes away from the first page where the first hammer stroke was made. As pages go by, this is the residual mark left by the hammer that shades off from the original impact. Here again a gesture freezes in a form. Here again it fades away but its apprehension remains possible. This link between the trace and memory is also at stake in D’aussi loin que je me souvienne…, consisting of a 180 cm diameter film roll of movie trailers. Here the traces – written on the celluloid and deprived of a projector that would read them, now appear as a memory whether to trust or not.
Thus, this is not a surprise to discover within this artist’s artwork corpus, a cardboard on which is drawn a figure wearing what seems to be missiles impacts. Found in the street, it used to be a target for kids. Same protocol –the traces reveal the nature of the phenomena responsible for them.

Text : François Aubart