Abstract
This practice-based PhD in Art departs from the green ray โ an optical phenomenon, that consists in the sunlight diffraction by the curvature of the earth โ which triggers, in the western coasts, where it is mostly seen, myths and love stories. This relation to an ungraspable event unfolds into the challenges raised by disrupted perception; the active and non-active dichotomy inherent to long-range observations; the immanence of an event; the way fiction is then attributed to indiscernible happenings and how its reenactment evokes a rite of passage, in order to arise questions that may provide new views of โwestern horizonsโ.
Some of these questions can be enunciated as follows: To fix a point-of-view, a very precise goal may still be seen, in the actual and western scope, as a strategy to achieve efficacy? How is inertia or non-action simultaneously active? In which way immanence is more effective than consistency? By stretching perception to its limits, may one inflect new imageries? And what is the role of these imageries, desires or myths in the development of a near future?
For dealing with these questions, I will use my own artistic practice as the platform. I started with a series of drawings produced in 2016, also entitled Le Rayon Vert (which intentionally maintains its French reference to Jules Verneโs romance and to Eric Rohmerโs movie, both based on the love myth in relation to the phenomenon) โ to unfold into other practical works, techniques and means that convey these questions further. These premonitory drawings were done by representing the traces of absent or unseen forms. From these, I intend to develop more complex works which may function as stage scenes or installations or even build-up situations, expecting to maintain them in their stage of latent immanence, transcribing the actual inquietude of our society.
It is through the openness of these artistic processes, that I hope to foster ideas and notions such as distance, inertia, speed, desire, enactment, affect-effect, immanence, efficacy and by putting them in tension with settled situations; to find clues or directions to trigger them and to make use of the gained knowledge (Erkenntnis), by means of art.
Being a study on efficacy, on space and time, a relocation of imageries โ making (thinking and doing) โ aesthetics, it is also a key for an artistic discourse capable to dialogue without constraints, combining conceptual objections with experimental practice, raising pertinent questions about the western directions towards the future. I hope that my research will contribute to this reflection which is crucial for todayโs society.