Averse is a video installation, in which a shower of lights falls into a disaffected building. In a random rhythm, neon tubes fall from their ceiling lights, and smash on the floor, in an explosion of glass shards. With each neon light that breaks, the site increasingly darkens. The fall, always unpredictable, leads the sequence to its ineluctable end: pitch-blackness.

The installation involves specific exhibition constraints. The screening wall must be white, in a totally dark room with white or light grey walls. The screening of the film must cover the whole of the wall from floor to ceiling. The screening space thus becomes an extension of the exhibition space, thanks to the colour of the walls of the room and the perspective of the framing, which is an extension of the plane of the projection room. A 3-second blackout is recommended before restarting the film, allowing the spectator to become accustomed to the half-light at the end of each sequence, before becoming dazzled once again by the image of this white room intensely lit by the racks of neon lighting on the ceiling. The screening serves to light up the site and the work, thus constituting a mise en abyme of the film.

Averse is the only video of Delphine Reist’s work to date and uses materials found in this ordinary site, that resembles an office, a school or a hospital. This choice of banal objects is omnipresent in her work, and places the poetry of the work within everyday life. The work simply represents a disruption: the neon lights are originally in their rightful place and function and only time precipitates their fall. It is as though the natural degradation of a place has been accelerated. As in all of her work, the presence of human beings is invisible; the objects seem to move of their own accord. Each neon light falls as though animated by destructive motivations. The progressive disappearance of the light makes the site look different with each new phase. This black out brings a little more mystery and uncertainty to this deserted site, with each shattering of a lamp on the floor. Making a room out of light makes the object visible by itself; the object becomes the light source. Here, the tube darkens the space, making the room disappear as it destroys itself. With the last explosion, the projection stops and the room falls into darkness.

The use of neons is reminiscent of recent works in art history, starting with Dan Flavin, followed by François Morellet or Vincent Lamouroux. But these artists construct space with their light sculptures, whereas for this Swiss artist, the lighting is used in a gesture of annihilation, a tabula rasa that begins all over again, identically, with the looped system. For Delphine Reist, objects have a life beyond that of their creator. People become the powerless spectators of a material world caught in the cycle of inevitable degradation, followed by almost immediate reconstruction.

Patricia Maincent