As devices of the imponderable in itself, As We Are Blind and Chutes libres will serve to guide us through this nebulous expanse. Placing us squarely in the field of the visible and of the image\u200a\u2014\u200athe very title of B\u00e9land\u2019s work reminds us of our constitutive blindness\u200a\u2014\u200athese two works seem to reveal the path forward by suggesting that the occult is presented not as a way of believing, or even of knowing, but as a way of seeing. Through a brief analysis of these two works, I define the particularities of this occult, situated between belief and non-belief, and shed light on its participation in our contemporaneity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Revealing the Undecidable<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nA hand is placed on the light sensor: the work is activated, instantly imprinting the image of idiosyncratic emanations and interpreting the harmony of an intimate resonance in real time. The inevitably playful dimension of As We Are Blind<\/em> evokes the unresolved tension between diversion and conviction that historian Cl\u00e9ment Ch\u00e9roux observed regarding nineteenth-century spirit photography.2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Cl\u00e9ment Ch\u00e9roux et al., Le troisi\u00e8me \u0153il : La photographie et l\u2019occulte<\/em>, exhibition catalogue (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 48.<\/span> Pype evinced a similar tension in his work when he invited performers to predict the future of spectators waiting to see their destiny set in a tiny drop of tin, conjuring both a whimsicality of approach and an earnestness in the secular technique of molybdomancy. Beyond an equivocal stance on belief, these two works illustrate a tension between belief and non-belief that lies at the very heart of the artists\u2019 constructions. The occult haunting contemporary art is thus decidedly undecidable<\/em>\u200a\u2014\u200ato use Jacques Ranci\u00e8re\u2019s term for describing the critical power of art as a practice of thresholds that tests the increasingly blurred border between art and non-art.3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - Jacques Ranci\u00e8re, \u201cProblems and Transformation of Critical Art,\u201d in Aesthetics and Its Discontents<\/em>, trans. Steven Corcoran (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 45\u200a\u2212<\/em>60.<\/span> Impelled by a play of tensions and unifications, by which \u201cthe border is always there and nevertheless already crossed,\u201d4<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 4 <\/a> - Ibid., 48.<\/span> the undecidable occult appears as a practice of the interstice, an in-between, at once one thing and its opposite. As a marker for this current occultism, the undecidable is presented as a preliminary stage, a veritable springboard enabling the suspension of the traditional conception of belief in favour of a more complex vision that can more adequately represent the nebula in which we find ourselves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Veronique-Beland_AsWeAreBlind\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Curtat_Veronique-Beland_AsWeAreBlind_03_CMYK-1-scaled.jpg\")
V\u00e9ronique B\u00e9land<\/strong>
As We Are Blind<\/em>, 2016, installation view, Espace Culture Lille 1,
Villeneuve d\u2019Ascq, 2016.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nRevealing the Image<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nLike the photographic revelation in As We Are Blind<\/em> and the chemical precipitation in Chutes Libres<\/em>, the undecidable is an image, a lever that reveals a practice of thresholds and gives shape to the occult at work in contemporary art. This practice of thresholds is central to B\u00e9land\u2019s work. Suggestive of those attempts, between science and belief, to crystallize human emanations onto a photographic plate, the work effectively brings our contemporaneity into dialogue with an era in which empiricism and the supernatural coexisted via the absolute objectivity attributed to photography in the production of evidence: tangible proof of the intangible. The work\u2019s algorithmic codification\u200a\u2014\u200aundergirding the dual translation of biometric data into colours and music\u200a\u2014\u200aseems to actualize this ambiguity in B\u00e9land\u2019s position, so crucial to the genre of emanational photography, by giving the image an almost acheiropoietic\u200a\u2014\u200anot produced by human hands\u200a\u2014\u200aquality, the guarantor of a certain objectivity. Midway between algorithmically objective proof and playfully subjective portrait, the status of the image produced by the work reveals that at the heart of our contemporaneity is the same ambiguity among art, science, entertainment, and the occult that haunted the modern mind at the turn of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Veronique-Beland_AsWeAreBlind_aura_03\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Curtat_Veronique-Beland_AsWeAreBlind_aura_03_CMYK-1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Veronique-Beland_AsWeAreBlind_aura_02\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Curtat_Veronique-Beland_AsWeAreBlind_aura_01_CMYK-1-scaled.jpg\")
V\u00e9ronique B\u00e9land<\/strong>
As We Are Blind<\/em>,
photographies of auras, 2016.
Photos : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Veronique-Beland_AsWeAreBlind_aura_01\"](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Curtat_Veronique-Beland_AsWeAreBlind_aura_02_CMYK-1.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nAlmost exactly re-enacting the divinatory Bleigie\u00dfen<\/em> ritual\u200a\u2014\u200astill practised today on New Year\u2019s Eve, or Saint Sylvester\u2019s Day, in Germany\u200a\u2014\u200aPype\u2019s work crystallizes a multitude of fundamentally acheiropoietic images. Consisting of small drops of molten metal solidified in cold water and then placed on a plinth, Chutes libres<\/em> is indeed presented as images not made by human hands, and by which, according to molybdomancy, a cosmic force shapes unique destinies.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Interpretive techniques in molybdomancy vary according to the cultures in which it is practised. Generally, this knowledge may be acquired, but it most often rests on a particular gift of some kind.<\/span> As art objects indistinguishable from artefact\u200a\u2014\u200athe remains of a ritual that an ethnologist might have catalogued\u200a\u2014\u200athe work opens up a distinctly more vertiginous dialogue: a confrontation of the contemporary with the archaic. Far from being an anachronism in our contemporary life\u200a\u2014\u200aa kind of remnant from pre-scientific times\u200a\u2014\u200athe work seems to suggest a -contemporaneity traversed by many temporalities, in which a deterministic vision of the world\u200a\u2014\u200aat the core of divination\u200a\u2014\u200acoexists with perspectives provided by science and modernity. Undecidable, the work does not pick a side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"Fondation](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Curtat_Benoit-Pype_Chutes-libres_Fondation-Francois-Schneider_03_CMYK-1-scaled.jpg\")
Beno\u00eet Pype<\/strong>
Chutes libre<\/em> , 2021, installation view,
Fondation Fran\u00e7ois Schneider, Wattwiller, 2015.<\/em>
Photo : Steeve Constanty, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nRevealing the Correspondences<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThus reflecting a contemporaneity steeped in anachronisms, these two works, acheiropoietic in their way, reveal undecidable images that produce an \u201cobjective\u201d portrait of subjectivity. Like the auratic portraits for which theosophy provided actual interpretive charts that matched colours with states of mind, the photographs in As We Are Blind<\/em> do not present images for contemplation so much as \u201cemotional maps\u201d to be decoded. In other words: images for reading. The same goes for the open image frozen in metal in Pype\u2019s work: like the coffee grounds or sheep\u2019s livers in which the future may be read, the work is situated in that occult conception of the world in which the \u201cBook of Nature\u201d can be read by way of correspondences that encompass in themselves all things visible and invisible. These correspondences represent in fact the very essence of what can be seen in the works of B\u00e9land and Pype: visible in the dual translation that associates tangible components of the human body with predetermined hues and notes in As We Are Blind<\/em>, and visible in the invisible connection, frozen in tin, between an individual\u2019s singular trajectory and the suprasensory forces animating the world in Chutes libres<\/em>. The theory of correspondences situates being in an infinite network of possibilities, seen to be reflected in the sensory way of the world. In the flickering belief induced by the undecidable occult, this principle of correspondences\u200a\u2014\u200aa rare common denominator in a flourishing nebula\u200a\u2014\u200ais offered to our gaze.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRevealing the Imprint<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nMuch more than the idea of a belief based on its opposition to some knowledge or to a notion of the contemporary, the undecidable occult seems to open onto a world made up of a network of correspondences and resonances. In the case of B\u00e9land, the initial contact with the work almost allows for literally touching the virtual\u200a\u2014\u200aat once a description of our contemporaneity and an invisible realm of possibilities\u200a\u2014\u200amaking As We Are Blind<\/em> an extension of our body in the network of analogies, a kind of perceptual prosthesis before our limited condition (since we are blind), of which technological advances are constantly reminding us. Set in the register of the image, the work therefore produces, first and foremost, our imprint: the trace of our reach into the world. At a time when our virtual presence circulates via algorithms that are constantly translating our data into a virtual portrait\u200a\u2014\u200aa unique algorithmic imprint in the digital\u200a\u2014\u200aAs We Are Blind<\/em> seems to reveal our intimate presence in a web of subtly interlaced connections invisibly enveloping us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\nMirroring a human destiny at a given moment, Pype\u2019s work fixes within an abstract portrait the image of a humanity connected to that which exceeds it. In an ironic relationship with the spatiotemporal continuum underscored by the title of the work itself\u200a\u2014\u200athe fall of the drop of molten metal seems much freer than the potentially determined fate that it is about to represent\u200a\u2014\u200athe determinacy of being opens onto the indeterminate image, irrevocably open. Chutes libres<\/em> is thus presented as the imprint of being in a world of images in which \u201cto read the world is also to link up the things of the world according to their \u2018intimate and secret relations,\u2019 their \u2018correspondences,\u2019 and their \u2018analogies.\u2019\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science<\/em>, trans. Shane Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 7.<\/span> Far from the hierarchical relationship of modernity dominating its environment, the undecidable occult reveals to the gaze a different, horizontal connection made of resonances and hybridizations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n![\"Benoit-Pype_Chutes](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/04\/105_DO_Curtat_Benoit-Pype_Chutes-libres_Fondation-Francois-Schneider_01_CMYK-1.jpg\")
Beno\u00eet Pype<\/strong>
Chutes libres<\/em>, installation view,
Fondation Fran\u00e7ois Schneider, Wattwiller, 2015.<\/em>
Photo : Pierre l\u2019Excellent, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Examples of a much larger phenomenon, the works of B\u00e9land and Pype set the tone of an undecidable occult that, through the prism of the image, is offered as an alternate way of seeing. Through a four-step revelation, As We Are Blind<\/em> and Chutes libres<\/em> point to elements of analysis that enable us to approach this increasingly frequent uptake of the occult, though it hardly presents a uniform front. An installation for aura and mechanical piano on the one hand, traces of performance and minimalist sculpture on the other: a world of difference and nonetheless a common thread through the undecidable, simultaneously characteristic of an object of study and of an analytical tool. Although this allows us to navigate the nebula, our real compass is the theory of correspondences. Opening up pre-established categorical limits of modernity and its Cartesian dualism, it transforms the undecidable occult into an indicator for the vast network that both contains and disseminates us, the mainstay of a vision of the world populated by the invisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTranslated from the French by Ron D. Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n
As We Are Blind<\/em>, 2016, installation view, Espace Culture Lille 1,
Villeneuve d\u2019Ascq, 2016.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Revealing the Image<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nLike the photographic revelation in As We Are Blind<\/em> and the chemical precipitation in Chutes Libres<\/em>, the undecidable is an image, a lever that reveals a practice of thresholds and gives shape to the occult at work in contemporary art. This practice of thresholds is central to B\u00e9land\u2019s work. Suggestive of those attempts, between science and belief, to crystallize human emanations onto a photographic plate, the work effectively brings our contemporaneity into dialogue with an era in which empiricism and the supernatural coexisted via the absolute objectivity attributed to photography in the production of evidence: tangible proof of the intangible. The work\u2019s algorithmic codification\u200a\u2014\u200aundergirding the dual translation of biometric data into colours and music\u200a\u2014\u200aseems to actualize this ambiguity in B\u00e9land\u2019s position, so crucial to the genre of emanational photography, by giving the image an almost acheiropoietic\u200a\u2014\u200anot produced by human hands\u200a\u2014\u200aquality, the guarantor of a certain objectivity. Midway between algorithmically objective proof and playfully subjective portrait, the status of the image produced by the work reveals that at the heart of our contemporaneity is the same ambiguity among art, science, entertainment, and the occult that haunted the modern mind at the turn of the twentieth century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\nV\u00e9ronique B\u00e9land<\/strong>
As We Are Blind<\/em>,
photographies of auras, 2016.
Photos : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nAlmost exactly re-enacting the divinatory Bleigie\u00dfen<\/em> ritual\u200a\u2014\u200astill practised today on New Year\u2019s Eve, or Saint Sylvester\u2019s Day, in Germany\u200a\u2014\u200aPype\u2019s work crystallizes a multitude of fundamentally acheiropoietic images. Consisting of small drops of molten metal solidified in cold water and then placed on a plinth, Chutes libres<\/em> is indeed presented as images not made by human hands, and by which, according to molybdomancy, a cosmic force shapes unique destinies.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Interpretive techniques in molybdomancy vary according to the cultures in which it is practised. Generally, this knowledge may be acquired, but it most often rests on a particular gift of some kind.<\/span> As art objects indistinguishable from artefact\u200a\u2014\u200athe remains of a ritual that an ethnologist might have catalogued\u200a\u2014\u200athe work opens up a distinctly more vertiginous dialogue: a confrontation of the contemporary with the archaic. Far from being an anachronism in our contemporary life\u200a\u2014\u200aa kind of remnant from pre-scientific times\u200a\u2014\u200athe work seems to suggest a -contemporaneity traversed by many temporalities, in which a deterministic vision of the world\u200a\u2014\u200aat the core of divination\u200a\u2014\u200acoexists with perspectives provided by science and modernity. Undecidable, the work does not pick a side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\nBeno\u00eet Pype<\/strong>
Chutes libre<\/em> , 2021, installation view,
Fondation Fran\u00e7ois Schneider, Wattwiller, 2015.<\/em>
Photo : Steeve Constanty, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nRevealing the Correspondences<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nThus reflecting a contemporaneity steeped in anachronisms, these two works, acheiropoietic in their way, reveal undecidable images that produce an \u201cobjective\u201d portrait of subjectivity. Like the auratic portraits for which theosophy provided actual interpretive charts that matched colours with states of mind, the photographs in As We Are Blind<\/em> do not present images for contemplation so much as \u201cemotional maps\u201d to be decoded. In other words: images for reading. The same goes for the open image frozen in metal in Pype\u2019s work: like the coffee grounds or sheep\u2019s livers in which the future may be read, the work is situated in that occult conception of the world in which the \u201cBook of Nature\u201d can be read by way of correspondences that encompass in themselves all things visible and invisible. These correspondences represent in fact the very essence of what can be seen in the works of B\u00e9land and Pype: visible in the dual translation that associates tangible components of the human body with predetermined hues and notes in As We Are Blind<\/em>, and visible in the invisible connection, frozen in tin, between an individual\u2019s singular trajectory and the suprasensory forces animating the world in Chutes libres<\/em>. The theory of correspondences situates being in an infinite network of possibilities, seen to be reflected in the sensory way of the world. In the flickering belief induced by the undecidable occult, this principle of correspondences\u200a\u2014\u200aa rare common denominator in a flourishing nebula\u200a\u2014\u200ais offered to our gaze.<\/p>\n\n\n\nRevealing the Imprint<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\nMuch more than the idea of a belief based on its opposition to some knowledge or to a notion of the contemporary, the undecidable occult seems to open onto a world made up of a network of correspondences and resonances. In the case of B\u00e9land, the initial contact with the work almost allows for literally touching the virtual\u200a\u2014\u200aat once a description of our contemporaneity and an invisible realm of possibilities\u200a\u2014\u200amaking As We Are Blind<\/em> an extension of our body in the network of analogies, a kind of perceptual prosthesis before our limited condition (since we are blind), of which technological advances are constantly reminding us. Set in the register of the image, the work therefore produces, first and foremost, our imprint: the trace of our reach into the world. At a time when our virtual presence circulates via algorithms that are constantly translating our data into a virtual portrait\u200a\u2014\u200aa unique algorithmic imprint in the digital\u200a\u2014\u200aAs We Are Blind<\/em> seems to reveal our intimate presence in a web of subtly interlaced connections invisibly enveloping us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\nMirroring a human destiny at a given moment, Pype\u2019s work fixes within an abstract portrait the image of a humanity connected to that which exceeds it. In an ironic relationship with the spatiotemporal continuum underscored by the title of the work itself\u200a\u2014\u200athe fall of the drop of molten metal seems much freer than the potentially determined fate that it is about to represent\u200a\u2014\u200athe determinacy of being opens onto the indeterminate image, irrevocably open. Chutes libres<\/em> is thus presented as the imprint of being in a world of images in which \u201cto read the world is also to link up the things of the world according to their \u2018intimate and secret relations,\u2019 their \u2018correspondences,\u2019 and their \u2018analogies.\u2019\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science<\/em>, trans. Shane Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 7.<\/span> Far from the hierarchical relationship of modernity dominating its environment, the undecidable occult reveals to the gaze a different, horizontal connection made of resonances and hybridizations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\nBeno\u00eet Pype<\/strong>
Chutes libres<\/em>, installation view,
Fondation Fran\u00e7ois Schneider, Wattwiller, 2015.<\/em>
Photo : Pierre l\u2019Excellent, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Examples of a much larger phenomenon, the works of B\u00e9land and Pype set the tone of an undecidable occult that, through the prism of the image, is offered as an alternate way of seeing. Through a four-step revelation, As We Are Blind<\/em> and Chutes libres<\/em> point to elements of analysis that enable us to approach this increasingly frequent uptake of the occult, though it hardly presents a uniform front. An installation for aura and mechanical piano on the one hand, traces of performance and minimalist sculpture on the other: a world of difference and nonetheless a common thread through the undecidable, simultaneously characteristic of an object of study and of an analytical tool. Although this allows us to navigate the nebula, our real compass is the theory of correspondences. Opening up pre-established categorical limits of modernity and its Cartesian dualism, it transforms the undecidable occult into an indicator for the vast network that both contains and disseminates us, the mainstay of a vision of the world populated by the invisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTranslated from the French by Ron D. Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nAs We Are Blind<\/em>,
photographies of auras, 2016.
Photos : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nAlmost exactly re-enacting the divinatory Bleigie\u00dfen<\/em> ritual\u200a\u2014\u200astill practised today on New Year\u2019s Eve, or Saint Sylvester\u2019s Day, in Germany\u200a\u2014\u200aPype\u2019s work crystallizes a multitude of fundamentally acheiropoietic images. Consisting of small drops of molten metal solidified in cold water and then placed on a plinth, Chutes libres<\/em> is indeed presented as images not made by human hands, and by which, according to molybdomancy, a cosmic force shapes unique destinies.5<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 5 <\/a> - Interpretive techniques in molybdomancy vary according to the cultures in which it is practised. Generally, this knowledge may be acquired, but it most often rests on a particular gift of some kind.<\/span> As art objects indistinguishable from artefact\u200a\u2014\u200athe remains of a ritual that an ethnologist might have catalogued\u200a\u2014\u200athe work opens up a distinctly more vertiginous dialogue: a confrontation of the contemporary with the archaic. Far from being an anachronism in our contemporary life\u200a\u2014\u200aa kind of remnant from pre-scientific times\u200a\u2014\u200athe work seems to suggest a -contemporaneity traversed by many temporalities, in which a deterministic vision of the world\u200a\u2014\u200aat the core of divination\u200a\u2014\u200acoexists with perspectives provided by science and modernity. Undecidable, the work does not pick a side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thus reflecting a contemporaneity steeped in anachronisms, these two works, acheiropoietic in their way, reveal undecidable images that produce an \u201cobjective\u201d portrait of subjectivity. Like the auratic portraits for which theosophy provided actual interpretive charts that matched colours with states of mind, the photographs in As We Are Blind<\/em> do not present images for contemplation so much as \u201cemotional maps\u201d to be decoded. In other words: images for reading. The same goes for the open image frozen in metal in Pype\u2019s work: like the coffee grounds or sheep\u2019s livers in which the future may be read, the work is situated in that occult conception of the world in which the \u201cBook of Nature\u201d can be read by way of correspondences that encompass in themselves all things visible and invisible. These correspondences represent in fact the very essence of what can be seen in the works of B\u00e9land and Pype: visible in the dual translation that associates tangible components of the human body with predetermined hues and notes in As We Are Blind<\/em>, and visible in the invisible connection, frozen in tin, between an individual\u2019s singular trajectory and the suprasensory forces animating the world in Chutes libres<\/em>. The theory of correspondences situates being in an infinite network of possibilities, seen to be reflected in the sensory way of the world. In the flickering belief induced by the undecidable occult, this principle of correspondences\u200a\u2014\u200aa rare common denominator in a flourishing nebula\u200a\u2014\u200ais offered to our gaze.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Much more than the idea of a belief based on its opposition to some knowledge or to a notion of the contemporary, the undecidable occult seems to open onto a world made up of a network of correspondences and resonances. In the case of B\u00e9land, the initial contact with the work almost allows for literally touching the virtual\u200a\u2014\u200aat once a description of our contemporaneity and an invisible realm of possibilities\u200a\u2014\u200amaking As We Are Blind<\/em> an extension of our body in the network of analogies, a kind of perceptual prosthesis before our limited condition (since we are blind), of which technological advances are constantly reminding us. Set in the register of the image, the work therefore produces, first and foremost, our imprint: the trace of our reach into the world. At a time when our virtual presence circulates via algorithms that are constantly translating our data into a virtual portrait\u200a\u2014\u200aa unique algorithmic imprint in the digital\u200a\u2014\u200aAs We Are Blind<\/em> seems to reveal our intimate presence in a web of subtly interlaced connections invisibly enveloping us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mirroring a human destiny at a given moment, Pype\u2019s work fixes within an abstract portrait the image of a humanity connected to that which exceeds it. In an ironic relationship with the spatiotemporal continuum underscored by the title of the work itself\u200a\u2014\u200athe fall of the drop of molten metal seems much freer than the potentially determined fate that it is about to represent\u200a\u2014\u200athe determinacy of being opens onto the indeterminate image, irrevocably open. Chutes libres<\/em> is thus presented as the imprint of being in a world of images in which \u201cto read the world is also to link up the things of the world according to their \u2018intimate and secret relations,\u2019 their \u2018correspondences,\u2019 and their \u2018analogies.\u2019\u201d6<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 6 <\/a> - Georges Didi-Huberman, Atlas, or the Anxious Gay Science<\/em>, trans. Shane Lillis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 7.<\/span> Far from the hierarchical relationship of modernity dominating its environment, the undecidable occult reveals to the gaze a different, horizontal connection made of resonances and hybridizations.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Examples of a much larger phenomenon, the works of B\u00e9land and Pype set the tone of an undecidable occult that, through the prism of the image, is offered as an alternate way of seeing. Through a four-step revelation, As We Are Blind<\/em> and Chutes libres<\/em> point to elements of analysis that enable us to approach this increasingly frequent uptake of the occult, though it hardly presents a uniform front. An installation for aura and mechanical piano on the one hand, traces of performance and minimalist sculpture on the other: a world of difference and nonetheless a common thread through the undecidable, simultaneously characteristic of an object of study and of an analytical tool. Although this allows us to navigate the nebula, our real compass is the theory of correspondences. Opening up pre-established categorical limits of modernity and its Cartesian dualism, it transforms the undecidable occult into an indicator for the vast network that both contains and disseminates us, the mainstay of a vision of the world populated by the invisible.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Translated from the French by Ron D. Ross<\/strong><\/p>\n
Chutes libre<\/em> , 2021, installation view,
Fondation Fran\u00e7ois Schneider, Wattwiller, 2015.<\/em>
Photo : Steeve Constanty, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\nRevealing the Correspondences<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Revealing the Imprint<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n
Chutes libres<\/em>, installation view,
Fondation Fran\u00e7ois Schneider, Wattwiller, 2015.<\/em>
Photo : Pierre l\u2019Excellent, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n