The work opens onto a blue screen. Timid bluish marks appear then withdraw. Appear / disappear, these hints of colour seem to echo the shape of a body. A face is slowly defined. The contrasts between the background and shape come and go perpetually, until the meeting and disappearance of these same notions. A sweeping movement tries to impose another face. Two silhouettes cross one another, hide and merge. The background becomes frenzied. Everything comes back, indefinitely. The first silhouette, the face, the reading light, the first silhouette .. everything speeds up, is carried away, flashes as if angry, then calms down. In his analyses of the film Thierry Kuntzel noted that the first traces of a film are already taken in the replays, that the film repeats itself. Nostos is made up of these replays. He also wrote that the viewer knows this, at the same time believing in the production of something new. In Nostos this 'something new' is limited to one or two minimal actions. An extremely thin and uncertain image, the opposite of cinema or television representation. An image from a video synthesiser. There are the beginnings of a story: a silhouette smoking in front of a window, a silhouette walking and crossing another, etc. Unfruitful stories required by the artist's approach. Just sufficient to avoid abstraction. Thierry Kuntzel explains himself thus: "To a certain extent, I hate representation, but hover around this repulsion-revulsion and fascination for representation´ Because I am always between the two´ I don't think I could work on an abstract image, I have a definite need for a representative level but it is always to be on the borderline; this moment where representation is on the verge of disappearing..." [1]

Light is the revealing element of video, it passes but does not make anything static. Just as no figure - it is only there to generate the next one in a complex tangle. An infinitesimal variation which always seems to be a replay of the same thing. The name of the work (Nostos, replay) expresses this state. Thierry Kuntzel writes: "Etymologically, nostalgia: the pain of the replay. "Nostos" - the painless replay [...]". Nevertheless "pain" is not completely evacuated but is found in what is probably its most positive form: la melancholy. In spite of the replay, something is happening. In an interview he declared: "The tapes and installations are seeking psychic operation, not only mine but also the viewer's, his memory, his forgetfulness, his sensitivity to the interaction of repetition and variation. The extreme slowness and watchfulness of the operation certainly has something to do with melancholic conditions." [2]

Etymologically speaking, "video" comes from the Latin video: I see. And what can we see in Thierry Kuntzel's video? Nothing but transition. This impression of liquidity stems from the temporal exploration of video. Time seems to be composed of a multitude of moments and each moment is nothing to Nostos, a freeze-frame is impossible because Nostos is in fact against freezing, the possible freezing of the image. Jean-Paul Simon compared Nostos to a flipbook where comprehension of the movement comes from the orderly turning of the pages and the traces they leave in our memory such that each one is superimposed on the previous one. All these patterns handled in a solid state which pass on the screen seem to sit one on top of the other, they become "memory volume" (T. Kuntzel). Scanning / erasure, the electronic traces penetrate directly into the memory, building up a real palimpsest, stratification of traces, shapes, colours, intensity. A diversity of breathing generating one single life; the ultimate concretion. The eminently mental support medium for Nostos I closely resembles a musical work where the partition is a coding of the work which only exists when it has been played in the mental space of the listener. The work does not query the representation but the fact that there is representation. Between perception, internal image and concept, the work is carried out in the psychic system, a very real place of transformation whereas on the screen is displayed the condition for the appearance of Nostos: disappearance.

Dominique Garrigues

[1] Participation of Thierry Kuntzel in Stefaan Decostere's video: Il y a une cassette vidéo dans la soupe (there's a video cassette in the soup) (1983, 63'), BRT, Brussels.
[2] Liliana Albertazzi, "Prendre le temps" (entretien) (Take the time - interview), Art Press, Paris, number 131, 1988, P. 30.