Windows is a technical study with the objective of recording a panoramic of three windows, shot against the light from inside a house. The panes of light are solarised and create imaginary landscapes, which are interrupted, on rare occasions, by reality (a branch). The colours chosen are unusual in this setting, mixed or in rich monochromes of saturated pinks, yellows and blues.

The sequences are composed of the superposition or over-printing of the windows, first in the wide space of the room, then in tight close-ups. The transition, as sequence follows sequence, is made by image melting, achieved by reducing brightness. For example, the dark, backlit area veers from black to mauve, and a rectangle of the same colour and the same degree of luminosity appears superimposed. A great number of abstract images on two levels are created like this.

In some sequences, light is represented by the mosaic effect, either inside one of the window's rectangles or full-screen. The reduction in the number of pixels in the video image leads to the extension of each point in a defined form Ë usually rectangular. This colourful and formal geometric play is animated by relatively rapid movement, then shifts across the screen and shatters the window and the star. The rectangles accumulate on the screen where they define four zones, then eight on two levels with a diagonal orientation in space. The motifs, colours and different rhythms multiply the imaginary landscapes and suggest not simply the windows of a house, but, for example, those of a bus or a train.

Windows have a particular place in art history. Firstly, the albertian window with its links to the conception of perspective and the movement of painting as imitation. Modern art goes against this, redefining the window as a flat space of the pictorial surface, with horizontal and vertical grid lines, with flat colour tints (in the works of Piet Mondrian, for example), but also with opacity (with Fresh Window (1920), Marcel Duchamp's window with black, leather panes). On the monitor, Gary Hill offers variations of a window, shot and recorded against the light - windows of journeys and dreams offered in a slow succession of electronic paintings.

Thérèse Beyler