“Antidote 5”

The annual group exhibition “Antidote” features a wide-ranging view of French contemporary art and is located in the heart of the trendy department store Galeries Lafayette. This year’s edition features a selection of works that reflect on the passing of time, fragility, and the tenderness of experience.

The duality between evanescence and permanence lies at the heart of Dove Allouche’s work. “Le Temps scellé” (Sealed Time), 2006, a series of thirteen color photographs, is a systematic yet desperate attempt to record a vanished moment. Indeed, the pictures depict the exact settings in thirteen still frames taken from Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker (1979), which was shot in the former Soviet Union. A feeling of decrepitude and abandonment emanates from these raw, lifeless country scenes, with ruins overgrown with vegetation and riddled with bullet holes. It is as if the passing of time had sucked all life and soul from a now-haunted landscape.

Similarly, Laurent Montaron’s Pace, 2009, is a disturbing demonstration of the passing of time despite the continuity of life. Life repeats itself endlessly, while subtle degradations bring it ever closer to a breaking point. An old-fashioned projector, visible behind a glass vitrine, projects a 16-mm silent film onto a screen. The work shows a close-up of a hand holding a beating heart freshly plucked from a carp and is projected as a never-ending loop. The continuous cycle of the film through the projector causes a slow but steady degradation of the image and ultimately wears down the film: a metaphor for the process of death. By reflecting on the fragility of life set against the passing of time, the works in “Antidote” ultimately confront the viewer with his or her own mortality.