Nostos II is an installation consisting of nine black and white video monitors set out to give the effect of cinema screen dimension. The nine screens are connected to nine video-recorders, each playing a different tape. Furtive images appear, filmed using a deliberately maladjusted "paluche" (mitt) - an Aaton 30. The nickname derives from the ease with which it fits the hand. Looking like a small electric torch, it features great manoeuvrability and extreme sensitivity to light. With the paluche, the eye isn't immobilised behind the camera, it's the hand that films. The movement confers its expressiveness on the image, distorting visual space. The milky traces come from the camera mis-function -induced by manipulation of the electron beam and the diaphragm. Thierry Kuntzell remarks, "The movement of the camera or the object filmed makes resemblance fade away [...], the process diametrically opposed to stabilisation, giving the effect of a figure emerging from formlessness." [1] The work produces violent light, provoking continual, searing after-images. The representation doesn't propose perspective, but rather depth and substance, where bright flashes are intricately organised in a series of changing forms. Passing from obliques to star motif to symmetry, they range across the whole surface. The whole has a rhythm that grows to a crescendo, from slowness through to acceleration. Nostos is Greek for return. Repetition insinuates itself everywhere among the monitors, from the same to the slightly similar. In the final scene, the voice of Joan Fontaine, in Max Ophuls' Letter from Unknown Woman, comes surging through, bringing the image to an end. Ever since his neon installations of 1976-1977, Thierry Kuntzel has worked with light as a raw material. Light that illuminates, burns, dazzles; light that flares in the image - a match, a torch, a blazing hearth. From fragility to the worst, light contains drama. It makes the work flicker from immobility to movement, always at the limit of abstraction. Thierry Kuntzel likes to quote Henri Michaux: "The small pile of colorant diffusing itself in minute particles, these transitions and not the final immobility of the painting, that's what I like." The fluidity of Nostos II hinges on four chapters, blended into the darkness: the smoking stranger, the growing pile of photographs, the pages of the book and the letter in the fireplace. The essential element of these minimalist actions is time. The way the movements resurge and start over again limits the scope of these scenes, to send it back to the non-linear complexity of the wall of images. "Editing the nine tapes is the patient job [...] through which the explosion of physical time is installed." writes Raymond Bellour. The bright after-images are like residual retinal images, drawn from the depths of a wavering memory, vague memories of traces between the surface of the screen and the depths of the memory. The nine screens are a metaphor of a "screen of memory", where each of the elements forms the unconscious part where the message remains furtive. As in a cinema, the installation is in a dark space, which accentuates the many images of burning. But the editing is as much about space - the conjunction of the nine screens - as about time. The work doesn't ask to be simply passed through, it has an allocated time-span. The spectator's eye roves from screen to screen, creating its own route over this electronic panorama, while confounding the notion of linearity and continuity in cinematography. Nostos II is part of a trilogy conceived in 1979: Nostos I (1979) Glimpses-passages; Nostos II (1984) After-images - fluids; Nostos III (1995) Powders-gels.

Dominique Garrigues

[1] Thierry Kuntzel, "Trois fois trois", Nostos II exhibition catalogue, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1984.