In Olision Valley (2014) one’s eyes come and go, rush into the relief, come up to the surface, detect fields that are neither welcoming or hostile, but rather peculiar. The latest video piece by Franck Lesbros shows a series of valley landcapes which rhythm takes its source in the iteration of plans and a soundtrack specifically composed for the film—like in all his projects, where musicians often collaborate in the creation process. Here, an outof- tune piano is used to create stretched sounds and a discordant music which is as captivating as the images.

In this fake mineral atmosphere where dark and brown keys are at stake, light becomes the important element which fluctuation, and in particular strike, enables to link together the sequences by the loss of all kind of spatiotemporal logic in the action while insisting on a series of small catastrophes such as landslides, explosions, fires... alongside the ride. Between appearances and disappearances—an almost evanescent world operates in a perpetual motion which bends seem elusive, revealing an elsewhere, and strange paths where nothing is never smooth, where everything seems mutable.

Filmed with models specifically procuded for each object, the artist’s videos become curious pieces at the crossroad between movies and sculptures, but also paintings through the flatness of most of the film’s parts that are shot with very frontal framings—among which can be reflected some Friedrich here, or Malevitch there, and many others elsewhere. All the more that, as often in his videos, perspectives have been meticulously thought. A world and a “visual” cinema where the artificial nature of the places and their fake aspect are largely assumed and never hidden, as if to get closer to a reality the artist is fully aware of not being able to catch, even through tricks. The intrinsic fragility of the overall, from the set to the action, reveals a will to apprehend the shooting in an experimental way. As, if a screenplay is written in advance, not everything can be controled during the making of the video, thus accident can happen without any need for containing it, a way to elude a programmed order and also, somehow, to thumb his nose at some of the the polished and glossed actual contemporary art productions. Is that to say that Lesbros has a pessimistic vision? Well, rather a determined will to activate the mecanisms of discomfort.