The eight video loops which make up this installation can be presented on monitors or they can be screened in a dark space; the important thing is that the eight images of the body appear simultaneously in the exhibition room, and the viewer can have several images in his field of vision to appreciate their serial effect. Images wavering between photography and film bring up bodies in a lighting which separates them from the dark ground of the screens, and highlights thoroughly enigmatic postures which the time of the gaze constructs and deconstructs little by little in silence. Each of the loops represents just one naked body animated by movements made without any intent, micro-movements repeated with slight variations, conjuring up spasms, trembling and shudders; they seem to reveal inner tensions and agitations on the surface, as if coming from the organs. The postures themselves refer more to the body as an organ than as an organism articulated in readable and identifiable forms, as they are in the tradition of the nude. They create the conditions of a confusion between a part and a whole, one limb and another, a solid and a void; and the confusion is felt to the point of sexual identity. The body is huddled, bent, gathered, or, conversely, in an extended position; the head and face are committed to the shadow; the points of support are moved away into dimensionless space; the camera's viewpoint brings about foreshortenings or, to the contrary, expansions of volumes. All these decisions are negotiated between the artist and his models based on the image sent back to the control monitor during the work: “There, instead of creating your body based on outward images, you construct it on the basis of inner images, and it is when you touch these other possible bodies which have been put on one side, and repressed, when you come against that, when something can once again emerge, that the body-image becomes live.” The technical wherewithal is very simple, and in a way archaic: it refers to a photographic and sculptural tradition – black and white and focused lighting, the body as a volume in a sculpture in the round, all help to evoke this history – and to a praxis of poses which stems more from posture than from position. But here there is no reference to any objective kind of photography or psychological portrait. The body appears in a renewed, not to say mind-blowing strangeness, caught in a hesitant pause between fixedness and motion. If the observer will give himself enough time, he becomes aware that it is he himself who mentally and time-wise constructs metamorphic representations of the body, based on a chaotic mass of flesh that is hard to describe, in which only one or two temporary points of reference are offered to his recognition. The figures created by the videographic and performative arrangement are thus suspended between the human and the animal, between female and male, feminine and masculine, between the imaginative world and the fantastical. The artist and his models function without any recognized “model”, in the interstice between photography, dance and video, in blades of time which separate the instantaneous from the enduring; on this side of gesture and movement, on that side of the freeze of the pause, they work “between” the body and between its determinations. Whence the mind-blowing effect provoked by these images: a still unknown body is presented to us, no longer made of surfaces and traditional forms, but of mass and tension, flesh and organic matter, folds and expanses animated by the relentless and irrational forces of the living. The bodies washed up there still move, unvanquished, completely caught in their act of becoming bodies, the body we do not yet know about but which “grows”, not without pain, to escape from its assigned boundaries and invent itself, beyond all narrative and all collective history. For Laurent Goldring, “the recurrent hypothesis of the exhaustion of representation does not hold; we do not yet know what the body can do and what the eye still has to see in it; proof too that if the body is formed, it can be dissolved into formlessness in order to be informed once again, and that excarnation has no end.” Far from the disenchanted practices of a vanquished and abandoned body, this work starts without naivety from the body which has, yes, foundered, but it gives it the means to find in the fall itself the possibility and the energy to rearrange itself differently in the world. In this, Laurent Goldring's approach is akin to the research undertaken by a new generation of “choreographers” who are often, by the by, his models (Alain Buffard, Xavier Le Roy, Benoît Lachambre, Maria Donata d'Urso), and who themselves use the image as a critical tool in their own work. It demonstrates that the body can still give rise to new representations, that its fi gures are not depleted, that it still has something to tell us about its condition, its identities, its sexuality, and its mystery, beyond its purely optical consideration and its stereotyped models of identification – in a word, that it is still to be invented.

Françoise Parfait
Translated by Simon Pleasance