Nicolaï (before) / Vladimir (after) Christophe Pichon

Nicolaï (before), Ilfochrome print, 64 x 44 cm
Vladimir (after), Ilfochrome print, 64 x 44 cm

“Nicolaï” (before) and “Vladimir” (after) are two photographs that stand independently of one another, but which Christophe Pichon chose to juxtapose in the exhibition Echos – Graphies. One depicts the gaze of Nicolaï Ceaușescu as a child, and the other, the embalmed hand of Lenin—the before and the after—seeing and acting. By photographing images (cinematic, broadcast on a television screen, or still), the artist performs a second “freeze-frame,” an expression borrowed from Serge Daney. Photography freezes the object in its movement (the movement of the gaze, the movement of the hand as it breaks down), a suspension that gives the image an existence of its own.

The fragment of the eye or that of the hand evokes the idea of the fetish in the sense that the image constitutes an imprint of the thing and not the thing itself.

Alexandra Gillet

“In Christophe Pichon’s work, the eye is not merely a reflective, analytical eye. It is an organ that transcends its assigned function of clear-sightedness to move toward what Bataille would call the pineal eye—that is, a wink that is at times monstrous, and in every way an eye that belongs to the realm of both bodily gaping and protrusion. But even more than that, this eye is first and foremost the eye of the camera, thereby echoing Gilles Deleuze’s observation regarding Vertov’s cinema: “The eye is not that of man, which is too still; it is the eye of the camera—that is to say, an eye within matter, a perception as it exists within matter, extending from the point where an action begins to the point where the reaction occurs. ”* The hand would then come to the aid of this eye of the camera, as if one had to avoid thinking solely with one’s retina. “Thinking with the hands,” said Jean-Luc Godard, for whom cinema cannot be conceived without being a story of hands.”

Larys Frogier, “The Photographic Put to the Test of Repetition: Andy Warhol, Félix Gonzalez-Torres, Christophe Pïchon, Cindy Sherman,” in Reproducibility and Irreproducibility of the Work of Art, proceedings of a bilingual symposium, Brussels: La lettre volée, 2001