ÉRIC MICHEL

Will we be able to transform utopia into reality? Umberto Eco

In the work of Eric Michel, Bilblioteca Fluo, the viewer ceases to be only an observer, that is, he is not only invited to watch but to enter temporarily into a system of visual and sound relationships that make him a participant in what happens at the time of its development. Starting from a real space, the library, the artist’s goal is to create a different cultural-social environment that establishes a communication between the public and the place of the work. What happens to those who enter the new “space-environment” created by Eric Michel is to experience a complex interaction between the spatiality represented by the library and the spatiality experienced by the viewer through not only the gaze, but in the entire sensory and body presence.

The place of the work is however only virtually modified, although it also creates a condition of disorientation, of estrangement that allows the transfer to an ideal reality. The artist, in fact, does not intervene occupying the space, to act on its structure in order to modify it, but taking advantage exclusively of the luminous, immaterial and ephemeral component, is able to concretely transform the environment. The light thus acquires a plastic value, being used in all its forms: from the fluorescent installation to the neon, to the video image. In the recent written-manifesto, Le Passeur, Eric Michel reveals to us the decisive importance that light possesses in his artistic research: “I love light. This is the privileged vehicle of my sensibility, of my work … Light has this unique, being in turn made up of a corpuscular and undulatory nature, material and immaterial. And for me the artist should be a ferryman, precisely from the material towards the immaterial, from the real to the imaginary, towards pure sensibility “. (*) Due to its characteristics of both material and immaterial elements, light becomes, for the artist, a means of privileged communication as a vehicle for ideas and thought, but above all for aesthetic research, for purely perceptual language. In addition to the space, time is also modified through the projection of what the artist calls “video in the video”: the projected images are formed by the overlapping of previous films, in which the same spectators were filmed, with their gestures and movements, intervening by making variations within the original video as it was thought by the artist. Time loses its traditional notion of chronological time as it contains a present that exists only as a mobile and elusive point along the past / future line.

(*) Eric Michel, Le Passeur, Rome 2007.