Take the space of a monologue in its sensitive duration, according to an absolute and purely subjective time. Suspend the detail of a tableau vivant within the overall story, the table of a bistro, with its hustle and bustle; suspend the liquidity of a voice that is always outside the frame, outside the world. Dennis Oppenheim captures the unspoken parts of language and not its content, the hollow of the ashtray as a devastated landscape which this undefined time pours into (the figure of the hollow that is widely developed throughout his work); he captures the fleeting in-betweens of words, emptiness and silence. Meticulously, he appropriates the gesture of the hand that, in its repetition, materialises the obsessive instant. As speech deteriorates and as musical sequences develop, the images present internal transformations, shifts, back projections and superimpositions. The image becomes more opaque, taking on a certain volume and density that tells the story of a transition from hollow to solid, absence to omnipresence, a passing of human energy to the environment, transfers between the elements that move away from their initial functions and redefine themselves in an elsewhere, between language and images.

Stéphanie Moisdon
Translated by Anna Knight