Paris-Art
PAINTING WITH CELL PHONESLike all great artists, Béatrice Valentine Amrhein knows how to brilliantly combine the ultra-contemporary with the traditional. Herlatest work, the VIDEOS Lustre installation, is designed entirely using cell phones. The screens of one hundred multimedia cell phones suspended from the ceiling by a braid of electric cables twinkle and hum as they each broadcast a specific, original video, all of which were produced, both images and sounds, using cell phones which, with an implacable esthetic coherency, are at the same time the tools, the components and the material of the work. One shouldn't be fooled though, this isn't just a question of some high-tech gadget, but of a real painterly approach to artistic creation. In the early 1970s, Christian Boltanski affirmed that he was «painting with photography». Today, Béatrice Valentine Amrhein is painting with cell phones, because they have become the natural extension of the eye and the hand. With solid training in painting and long experience as a painter, she here become part, and this in a completely original manner, of a vast current of contemporary art with the objective of reinventing the act of painting and so anchor it firmly in the 21st century. Painting is not limited only to the age-old alliance of colored pigments and canvas hung on a wall, but rather is considered as an artistic way of doing and seeing something. It's a question of body, of gesture and of material. Seeing in painting signifies being sensitive to the act, to objects, to qualities of light, to materials and to shapes, to temporalities and to opacities, as well as to the echoes that emanate from all of the history of art, as well as the murmurs of the world hidden in the folds of the works themselves. It's this open and contemporary conception ofpainting that Béatrice Valentine Amrhein literally puts into practice via the cell phones. Through a pixelization process pushed to the extreme, their mediocre technical definition made it possible for her to obtain a new and original texture of images to which the feeble video performances give a distinctive jerky effect. The singularity of her result as well, with the conversion of the technical weakness of the tools used into an esthetic strength. Béatrice Valentine Amrhein makes use of the visual and auditory material obtained in this way, and the proximity authorized by the perspective of cell phones, to represent bodies, to examine them, to interfere with their folds, and to travel all over the surface of their skin and their surroundings, in order to reach, beyond these surfaces, their «bodily system» to draw up a sensory map. The pictorial approach of the VIDEOS lustre is prolonged by a «Wall of images» composed of twenty-one large format photographic prints (118 cm x 135 cm) of views taken from thephone videos. While at the same time the problem of the body that irrigates the entire work is actualized through interactivity: three of the videos are projected in continuity on amazing air screens through which the spectator is invited to walk and so literally enter into and become part of the work.
André Rouillé
Art Critic / Paris-Art.com
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