Time Smoking a Picture shows how time constructs the image, destroying it at the same time. The work unfolds in continuity. A continuity which seems to be immobile, but where transition proves to be the essential element for marking the passage of time within this fixed frame. Thierry Kuntzel films a sunset as it happens, a pure passage of interiorised time, like the screen image of the author staring into space, smoking a cigarette. The image is consumed by this interiorisation of time, in the same way as a cigarette is consumed. How does he show us this inexorable passage of time? Through colour and space. The monitor screen reveals an empty room, with only a fireplace at the far end. The fireplace itself is captured within another screen. On the left, two large windows let the light in. This space , double space , varies chromatically. A projector occupies the right side of the foreground. This screen within the screen, combined with a lack of opacity and lateral lighting in predominantly russet tones, gives the singular impression of a cross between a Georges Rousse Ectachrome and a canvas by Vermeer. A door opens on the left. A man comes in. He walks across the room. His body isn't visible in the central frame. He goes towards the windows and disappears. At the end of the tape the image inverses, then finishes with a few lines from Raymond Roussel's La Vue: "My eyes sweep to an azure corner, my thoughts / Dream, absent, lost, undecided and forced / To go back to the past, for it is the exhalation / Of sentiments felt through a whole season / Which emerge for me with the power of seeing / Due to the suddenly heightened intensity / Of vivid and latent memories of a summer / Already dead, already far from me, quickly swept away." It is only a small step from the feelings Raymond Roussel experienced one summer, to Thierry Kuntzel's perception of time, in his Parisian workshop at rue du Perche where this tape was filmed. Thierry Kuntzel wrote, (12^th of march 1980): "It's as if the image ,the mirror I've lived in, the imaginary space I've crossed - as if the image was finally turning round [...], as if infinite time, the melancholy beating (manic-depressive), stopped, the summer over (in a condensed image - me sitting on the window-ledge while the sky turns blue). Yes, as if the image, the mirror and infinity were abandoned: seeing, as it happens, fading away against a wall of luminous traces [...]" [1]

The screen within the screen is a truncation of perspective. The transparent quality of the central frame prolongs the image but also breaks away from it, through an ambiguity of shots, depending on the lighting employed. It's a technique used currently in painting, to bring forward one shot in relation to another by using the optical illusion of colours. When the frame becomes opaque it is perceived in the background. This feeling is even stronger when the person moving across the room becomes invisible in the centre of the screen. Space then becomes torn and split, letting the superimposed layers of time show through. The interior frame, like the exterior frame in which it is contained, makes a dis-union which invokes perception itself as much as the mental representation of that perception. Watching this work leads to the realisation that perception is, above all, an image - an image that is recorded in time. Time Smoking a Picture is part of the pictorial tradition, which shows a mirror, a photograph or another picture inside a work. This allows a return to the work itself and an understanding of the work as an image, by the transition from one to the other. A quotation is given in its original form: the reference to a past work. In La Desserte blanche (1980), Thierry Kuntzel related to Matisse: with Time Smoking a picture, he turns towards Hogarth. In his etching Time Smoking a Picture (1761, first stage, British Museum, London), Hogarth put the Greek inscription: "For time is not a great artist, but it weakens everything it touches." In the etching, a winged man (the personification of time) is smoking. Smoke covers the etching while the left hand holds a scythe which transpierces the work. Time appears as the death of the painting. Hogarth was responding to the widely held idea that time polished and improved paintings. On the contrary, time erases the representation.

Dominique Garrigues

[1] Thierry Kuntzel, "Time Smoking a Picture / Notes", catalogue Thierry Kuntzel, Paris, éd. du Jeu de Paume / Réunion des musées nationaux, 1993, p. 102.