In Incidence of Catastrophe, there is an experience of the materiality of things and signs – as Gary Hill would say a "physical element" – which affects us, pricks our curiosity and disturbs. It is the visible element, pinned between the solidity of the tangible and the assertiveness of the writing, which expresses intimate, violent relationships between image, text and body. We pass from the flesh of words to the text of things.

Incidence is derived from Maurice Blanchot's work, Thomas the Obscure, reading which could not be more literary and physically close to the text since the reader's eye collides with pages and words which suddenly seem to be of an obvious yet outrageous materiality. What Gary Hill manages to make us feel is the flesh of words on a page, inasmuch as the 'readable' first goes through a visible and tangible element; and his fingers which fondle and crumple the paper, making it rustle, make reading, which is a silent event, as noisy as the roar of the ocean: catastrophic.

Gary Hill mistreats this text which vibrates and rumbles until he, himself, is injured by the text when he cuts his finger as it slides along a sheet of paper: a literal image of the placing of the text in the body. Etymologically speaking, writing is just this, a cutting movement, a tear. It functions by a process of incisions or breaks. The written form is the scratch. The concept of writing is, therefore, not specific to the literary form but rather to this power of fragmentation and dissemination in the world.

The violence that cries out dully in the last image of Incidence is indescribable. The implausible relationship generated by the picture is unimaginable. The image shown is one of the 'scrutinising element' which has become this crude, stiff thing, this wooden stick hanging onto the camera and pointing to things in the picture – in particular towards Gary Hill's naked body, curled up (in the fœtal position) in front of a text of fire flamboyantly projected onto the walls of the room. This dehumanised index concentrates all the corporeality of the tangible in its absurd extension. Rarely have the image and the body, avoiding obscenity, been put into such an insufferable relationship, indicating the outside from within, piercing it from the inside, penetrating a world when the inner self is pulverised and plunged into the proximity of an unknown infinity.

Paul-Emmanuel Odin