What is a flying carpet? One can multiply the theories related to its presence in oriental tradition, and link the themes of levitation and transport associated with it to prayer or war, to magic or nomadism (according to the appealing theory of Sergio Bettini, the carpet is not an object but a place: it is the home of the person who does not have a home). But to probe more deeply, the flying carpet is above all a metaphor of the carpet itself. Even though, according to modernist tradition, the carpet was used as a paradigm for the affirmation of flatness in painting, it can, on the contrary, also be envisaged as a way of introducing movement in surfaces that, by using the properties of expansion, rotation or unwinding, produces effects of floating, disorientation or disequilibrium. Interlinked edges blur the notion of boundaries and suggest a virtual and undefined extension of the carpet beyond its own edges. Intricate interlacing and arabesques in which the eye gets lost, wefts and woofs superimposed to form lattice or seed patterns combine, in a contradictory optical unity, a geometrical division of the field and haphazard scattering of motifs. Alternating positive and negative forms on the surface of the field suggest deep hollows. In short, the visual economy of the carpet is based on an interplay of plastic properties that call into question the stability of the surface, the restrictions of the field or the dual dimension of the plane.

Carpets produce this transformation of the space of representation into a field of power in simultaneity. Films - in the age of reproducibility, has taught us to perceive it in its succession. As an extension of the exhibition The Movement of Images4, this project is based on the intuition that cinema should not reduced to the experience with which it has been identified throughout the 20th century, that of a projection in a space standardized by the norms of theatricality. It involves on the contrary a series of properties or forces aimed at bringing surfaces to life - unwinding, projecting, editing - that go beyond the traditional cinematographic system and find a kind of model in the organization of the carpet.

The exhibition proposes to bring together and compare real carpets and films. Carpets that, according to their function (prayer carpet, war carpet, garden carpet), texture (carpets in buqalemun silk with undecidable colours) or composition (grids, seed patterns, centred around a medallion), produce an effect that enlivens the surfaces: Films that in this way can be reconsidered from the ornamental point of view: monochrome compositions evoking the undefined linear traces of Navajo blankets (Paul Sharits, Nothing), a film on which sprigs of grass, leaves and insect wings are directly stuck like a cinematographic equivalent of garden carpets (Stan Brakhage, Mothlight), positive/negative inversions producing an effect identical to that of retractable motifs (Peter Kubelka, Adebar), overlapping borders (Hans Richter, Rhythm 21), ...

Contemporary works that use the formal properties of carpets to energize the plane or to dissolve it will also be included: square patterns and modular repetition (the floors of Carl Andre), effects of levitation or suspension
(Hans Haacke, Blue Sail), medallion compositions (Zilvinas Kempinas, Flying Tape), dispersion of discrete elements on an open field (Taysir Batniji, Hannoun), ... A Florentine painting of the XVth century, with a patterned background will be shown in dialogue with contemporary paintings by Jugnet + Clairet.

Finally, the exhibition will include sounds with the presentation of a musical piece by Morton Feldman that draws inspiration from the composition of Turkish carpets (String Quartet II) and replaces the notion of composition by that of a temporal field.

Last checked: 2012-06-19 10:40