Three seconds and two images (Trois secondes et deux images)
2012 – 2015
Paper and acrylic collage on 30 canvases – Single copy – 120 x 80cm
In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes perfectly defines the difference between film and photography. “…in the cinema, no doubt, there is always a photographic referent, but this referent shifts […] “In the Photograph, Time’s immobilization assumes only an excessive, monstrous mode: Time is engorged.”
It is this “engorgement” of time that Michaux seeks in her work, stopping the motion and selecting fifty successive photogrammes. Fifty photogrammes – or three seconds – two images of a film shot at sixteen frames per second.
In this way, the artist emphasises what the recording misses. There is life on the screen but there is also an absence, darkness, death between the images.
The choice of medium and material is typical of the pictorial genre of vanitas.