Thierry Kuntzel's installation Autumn (Mount Analogue) was completed in 1997, four years after the artist's solo show at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, in which he showed the installations Summer (Double view), 1989, Winter (The Death of Robert Walser), 1990, and Spring (Springtime Step), 1993, all grouped together under the title Four Seasons Less One. In that show the seasons were assembled in a cross-shaped arrangement, each one of them occupying one of the branches of this cross (the fourth branch being earmarked for autumn), while the central part, Less One, consisted in a dark, acoustic room, forming an obligatory passage for proceeding from one season to the next.

While Winter (The Death of Robert Walser) and Spring (Springtime Step) consist in triple projections of average and equal dimensions, Summer (Double View) is made up of a very large projection opposite a single monitor. This same arrangement applies to Autumn (Mount Analogue), as well as Autumn (In Praise of Shade), a sort of variation on Mount Analogue, completed at Kyoto in 1998 for the Eye & Mind exhibition held at the Gumma Museum of Modern Art, in Japan.

The two videos of Autumn (Mount Analogue), each lasting 5'51", with no sound and in colour, are designed to be shown as a loop, and synchronized. The video made for the monitor consists in a still shot of Ken Moody's eyes, Moody being the model who crops up in all Kuntzel's seasons. The look on his face is filmed very close-up, with his eyes opening and then staring hard at the viewer throughout the video, then closing again in the final moments. Around the second minute, a rock is fleetingly and almost imperceptibly reflected in the model's iris, the sole "event" in the whole installation. This image appears like a kind of forewarning of the video projected opposite Ken Moody's face. This video actually ends on the image of this same rock, after "traversing a landscape", whose visual effect is akin to a dream experience: a succession of hills and mountains, then forests and fir trees, files gradually past in a very fluid process of superimposing then erasure of the images, like effects of persistence, culminating in the image of the rock. The actual stuff of the image is worked on in this piece: the colours and the brightness of the light vary with the shots, and the pastel shades of the mountains make way for the bright greens of the firs and, last of all, the darker image of the rock; likewise, the movement results just from crossing the landscape and the sequence of images, themselves still, to a very calculated rhythm, alternating cadences. The absence of sound prompts the viewer to be particularly attentive to the passing of time evoked by these images of a moving landscape, forever developing. The sober quality of images and effects in Autumn (Mount Analogue) is peculiar to all Kuntzel's installations, while pictorial references often lie at the root of the way his works are conceived (Matisse in the installation The White Sideboard (1980), Poussin in Summer (Double View). So it was Watteau whom Kuntzel had in mind when he came up with the installation Autumn (Mount Analogue), about which he wrote: "I remember--or I dreamed about--a hanging at the Louvre in Paris--where Wattau's Gilles was placed opposite L'Embarquement pour Cythère. It was violent and beautiful, that separation. I'm hoping to keep a trace of it in the installation Autumn".

Frédérique Baumgartner